What does sport mean to you? Fun and other preferences for adolescents’ sport participation

The point that fun is the most important preference for both adolescents and adults when it comes to sport participation has resonance within the field of health promotion, as it suggests that sports and activities that generate fun increase the likelihood of people, especially adolescents, maintaining their involvement in sport. Moreover, sport is associated with class and gender suggesting that sport may be differentially experienced by young people according to their social location. This article explores first how the preference for fun is distributed in the adolescent population, particularly in relation to gender and class, and second, what are the social processes through which fun is generated. Two sets of data were used, both based on 16- to 19-year-old Norwegian adolescents, one quantitative and one qualitative, and there were three main findings. First, that fun is the number one preference, but the explanation of fun may vary. Second, that there is a mixture of preferences explaining young people's sport participation that may be related to both intrinsic and instrumental values. Third, that the triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods should be developed, in order to gain more information about distributions of sport participation (and other physical activity habits) across social groups, and in order to understand the processes leading to participation/non-participation within the groups. Only in that respect, could the existing knowledge be applied for health promotion purposes.