Description:
Children‘s involvement in sport has increased over the past decade, with the health benefits associated with regular physical activity and, more specifically sports, now well established. Sport participation makes an important contribution to children‘s overall physical activity levels, and reduces the risks of childhood obesity and other associated childhood diseases. Although the benefits of sport participation are known and sport injury among children has become an international public health concern, it remains unclear how sport injury impacts on children‘s long-term sport involvement. This Chapter presents the detailed findings from a qualitative investigation of the key factors that influence children‘s continued sport participation, possible sport dropout and their sports choices, while exploring the potential impact that sport injury and injury risk perception has on children‘s organised sport behaviours. In this study a total of 43 children, aged 9-17 years, who were involved in an organised (after school) sport, took part in one of eight focus group discussions. Children were recruited from one of six sports (Australian football, badminton, golf, netball, soccer and swimming) and all participated at a community club or sub-elite level. Each focus group consisted of 5-6 children and each separate discussion was approximately 30-minutes duration. Focus groups were conducted until saturation of themes was obtained. Questions focused on children‘s sport participation, reasons for their continuation/discontinuation of sport and the encouragement/discouragement they received from parents. Other key factors that were discussed included injuries that children had sustained while participating and whether sport injury or child‘s perception of injury risk discouraged their participation and/or impacted on their parents‘ support of their participation. Overall, few children were concerned about the risk of injury while participating in sport. However, many children discussed not wanting to play contact sports such as Australian football, rugby or boxing, perceiving these sports as being too rough, and with an increased chance of injury. The main reasons the sport-active children reported for discontinuing their prior sport involvement were a lack of enjoyment and restrictions on their time. Children reported parents to be supportive of their participation in sport regardless of safety concerns. No instances of parents preventing child sport involvement were reported by children. The results from this study can be used to inform sporting bodies and health agencies of the sport injury and safety concerns held by children and how these impact on their choice of sporting activity, while highlighting areas that can be targeted in order to retain child participants.
Description:
Sport participation is popular among millions of children in countries throughout the world. The well-documented health benefits of children‘s sport participation are important to help reduce childhood obesity and the burdens of other associated childhood diseases. Despite efforts to promote sport participation, unfortunately involvement for some children can be short-lived with sport dropout (or attrition) rates being relatively high, particularly during adolescence. Although research investigating the area of child sport dropout began more than 30-years ago, there is still much to learn about the issue, and correspondingly it has been identified as a major concern by both sport practitioners and researchers. Whilst previous studies have uncovered some factors that distinguish children who do and do not drop out of sport, a detailed examination of the published literature is required to characterise these issues further and to identify where knowledge gaps exist more fully. This Chapter reports the results of a systematic review of existing peer-reviewed literature related to reasons why children decide to drop out of sport. The Chapter identifies and critically reviews relevant studies and provides a summary of their findings to contribute to a clearer understanding of the factors influencing child sport dropout. In doing so, it identifies potential opportunities for preventing child sport dropout and for promoting long-term sport participation by all children. Using specific inclusion and exclusion criteria associated with the defined systematic literature search strategies, few relevant studies were identified which addressed the issue of child sport dropout. Nonetheless, this review has identified prominent factors that contribute to child sport dropout, such as conflict of interests and time availability, the re-orienting of interests and the pursuit of participation in other activities. An important finding of the review is the identification of a clear gap in knowledge surrounding the impact of sport injury as a contributing factor to child sport dropout. In fact, sport injury appears to be largely overlooked and/or removed from studies that seek to determine the factors that contribute to dropout in children‘s organised sport. In light of international public health concerns about sport injury, and global strategies to increase participation in sport and other physical activities, it seems pertinent to obtain a better understanding of the true impact that sport injury has on the long-term retention of children in sport.