Socialization Effects of Participation in Sport: A Critical Review of the Research

Abstract

An attempt was made to review the empirical evidence regarding the socialization effects of participation in sport. The research was discussed with reference to three types of socialization effects; psychological effects, behavioral effects, and attitudinal effects. An initial review showed the results of these studies to be both contradictory and confusing. The results were divided between support and nonsupport for the possibility of socialization effects, and in addition some results suggested unexpected and undesirable relationships between personal characteristics and participation in sport. A further analysis of this research, concentrating specifically upon methodological and theoretical concerns, indicated (1) that its use of comparisons of samples of athletes and nonparticipants as the basis for investigating for the possibility of socialization effects was invalid because of an erroneous assumption of initial population similarity, (2) that much of its instrumentation was questionable and was certainly not comparable, and (3) that it neglected the theoretical issues inherent in the socialization “treatments” received by the experimental populations. On the basis of the contradictions in the research results, and the methodological and theoretical issues which put their validity in doubt, it was concluded that, to date, there is no valid evidence that participation in sport causes any verifiable socialization effects.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 60 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.