Rethinking Sport Type: Adolescent Sport Contexts and their Associations With Sport Enjoyment

Researchers, and the public alike, assume that sport types (e.g., team, contact, aesthetic) inherently produce certain environments. To test these assumptions, we examined how sport types relate to adolescent participants’ perceptions of sport contexts. Using survey data from 841 U.S. youth in 54 sports, we adopted a novel approach to include multiple sport types when (a) describing how sport types correlate to the perceived sport context and (b) examining how variance in sport enjoyment is predicted by sport type alongside other relational and structural aspects. Results show that sport types consistently predicted structural characteristics (e.g., team sports involved increased interdependence perceptions); yet, we observed fewer differences for relational characteristics (e.g., perceptions of friends). Relational characteristics also accounted for considerable variance in sport enjoyment, not explained by sport type alone. This study shows that clearer sport type definitions and precise assessments are needed to capture contextual factors that predict sport enjoyment.