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Children's Participation in Sports

Participation in organised cultural and physical activities is an important element of a child’s social development. In recent years, increasing awareness of the incidence of childhood obesity has particularly highlighted the desirability, on health grounds, for children to participate in regular physical activity. Participation in organised sport, as a subset of broader physical activity, is also important for the development of motor coordination skills, teamwork and physical fitness. While changes in children's sports participation over their life cycle can be best examined using longitudinal data, which follows the same children over time, such data are not always available and are often costly to collect. One alternative is to pool data from successive cross-sectional surveys and construct a 'pseudo-longitudinal' dataset to study this phenomenon.

The Analytical Services Branch recently released a research paper entitled 'Children's Participation in Organised Sporting Activity' that looked at children's participation in organised sports within a 'pseudo-longitudinal' framework (ABS Cat. No. 1351.0.55.028). The study was based on data from three repeated cross-sectional surveys of Children's Participation in Cultural and Leisure Activities (CPCLA) (2000, 2003 and 2006). It examined how participation in sports by children changes as they grow older and what factors influence such participation, including the effects of age, period and cohort. While these three independent cross-sectional surveys do not allow tracking of participation of individual children over time, the aligning of the age, period and cohort characteristics allow the study to follow the average behaviour of children from the same birth-year cohort, and compare their age-specific participation rates with those of other cohorts, while controlling for changing social and cultural influences.

The authors initially applied a simple 'age-period-cohort' accounting model to the full dataset and to selected subpopulations of interest to get some insights into the relative importance of these dimensions in explaining the variation in participation rates. Evidence of strong age effects was found, indicating that children’s participation in organised sporting activity reaches a peak in the 9–11 years age-group, and then declines. This behaviour was consistently observed, even for groups of children that report significantly different rates of participation. A rising trend in participation rates between 2000 and 2006 was also observed, but this was not uniformly observed over all subpopulations. In particular, no increase in participation was reported among children from more disadvantaged areas. No discernible evidence of consistent cohort effects, however, was detected.

To obtain further insights into the factors influencing participation in organised sporting activity, especially at the individual level, the authors then fitted a logistic regression model to the data, supplementing the age, period and cohort effects with a range of observed socio-demographic characteristics pertaining to the child, the family and the neighbourhood. Not only did this modelling framework allow for the identification of the relative importance of key factors associated with children’s participation in sport, it also provided a means of verifying the preliminary findings on age, period and cohort effects. The results from the earlier analysis suggested an appropriate solution to the identification problem which arises when age, period and cohort variables are included simultaneously in a model. The cohort variable was collapsed into fewer categories, focussing attention on the stronger age and period effects.

Results from the logistic regression model confirmed the significant age and period effects, and factors such as gender, parents’ employment status, country of birth and the relative socioeconomic status of the neighbourhood were found to be strongly associated with children’s participation rates. Children who spent more time on television and computers were also found to be less likely to participate in organised sporting activities. No cohort effects in sports participation were observed during the period under study, confirming the preliminary findings.

The absence of a cohort effect in the model was not totally unexpected – given the short period spanned by the study and the minimal age separation of the defined cohorts. An initial objective of the study was to assess whether or not younger cohorts of children are participating less in sport than their predecessors. The limitations of this study, however, would suggest that it is premature to form a strong view on this question. The main shortcoming of the current analysis is that most cohorts have not yet been tracked over all age-groups, and hence it is not possible to contrast their age-specific participation rates. The inclusion of data from future surveys (e.g. the 2009 CPCLA) should lead to improvements in the estimation of cohort effects. There remain, of course, questions that can only be answered by true longitudinal data. For example, it is not possible to observe whether young children who played sport will continue to play sport, or what factors may prompt individual children to engage or disengage in a range of sporting or alternative activities.