Pupils in upper secondary school sports: choices based on what?

In the fields of both education and sport, the possession of capital and habitus influences an individual's lifestyles and choices, which in turn affects the social selection within these fields. In this article, we will study the Swedish system of school sports as an overlap between the fields of education and sport, and thus viewed as a double dominated field. From a cultural sociological perspective, the purpose of this article is to analyse and explain how the organisational conditions and pupils' social characteristics interact with upper secondary pupils' choices of different school sports programmes in Sweden. Based on registry data on secondary school sports pupils, the results show that the supply of school sports requires specific forms of social dispositions that have an impact on which categories of pupils choose to participate. Among the students participating in school sports, there is a higher proportion of pupils who: are of Swedish origin (p < 0.05), are boys (p < 0.05), attend academic study programmes (p < 0.05), and have parents with high educational capital (p < 0.05). Furthermore, based on 677 pupils' questionnaire responses, collected through two studies on school sports in Sweden, the results show that the choice between different types of school sports programmes is related to the intersection between pupils' sex and possession of educational and sporting capital. One important conclusion is that the overlap between the fields of education and sports exacerbates gender and class biases, and that the supply of school sports in Sweden appeals to a narrow or rather specific taste for sport and education, particularly favouring boys with highly educated parents and an interest in team sports.