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This study tests a model specifying that girls' precollege participation in sporting activities will foster positive body images, enhanced perceptions of physical competence, and more flexible gender identities, which, in turn, predict higher college self-esteem. A sample of 220 college females (mean age = 19.65 years) provided retrospective reports of their precollege sport involvement and contemporaneous assessments of body image, perceived physical competencies, gender identity, global self-esteem, and other psychosocial variables. Consistent with prior reports on male and mixed-gender samples, greater precollege sport participation predicted higher self-esteem in this exclusively female sample. Follow-up path analyses and tests for mediation revealed that the model's intervening variables totally mediated the sport participation/self-esteem relationship. The patterning of these data implies that participating in sports promotes females' self-worth by fostering physical competencies, favorable body images, and gender flexibility, and, in the absence of any such psychosocial benefits, participation in sports has little salutary effect on and can even undermine self-esteem.
Richman et al. (Thu,) studied this question.