Abstract
Young athletes value their social relations in sports, and these social relations can have consequences when it comes to joining, continuing, and quitting sports. Yet the important question of how social relations in sports develop has not yet been adequately answered. Hence, we investigated how athletes’ social relations in sports depend on social relations outside of sports: in leisure, school, and social media. A total of 387 athletes (aged 16–19) from 30 Norwegian sports groups completed a survey on electronic tablets. We asked how social relations in leisure, school, and social media—through the social mechanisms of contact, homophily, and contagion—influenced social relations in sports. We also controlled for the effect of exercise frequency and duration (years) of contact in sports. Exponential random graph modelling (ERGM) analyses showed that first and foremost, relations from social media and leisure, but also school networks and exercise frequency, influence sports networks. This study shows that social relations in sports are diverse and depend on social relations outside sports. We discuss how this has ‘counterintuitive’ consequences for sports participation, particularly the importance of supporting athletes’ social relations outside of sports for the strengthening of social relations within sports when addressing challenges concerning recruitment, continuation, and dropout from sports.
Highlights
IntroductionAcademic Editors: Hagen Wäsche, Annika Frahsa and Ansgar Thiel
Commenting on the situation of social network studies in general, Small claims that ‘ . . . in their devotion to studying the consequences of social ties, many researchers have taken for granted the process from which ties arise’ ([21], p. 8). We argue that this observation is valid for sports studies, and in the current study, we investigate the consequential issue of how the often-praised social relations in youth sports develop
Those within each team going to the same school belong to what we call a school network, teammates who share a leisure activity are part of a leisure network, and those athletes who meet on social media constitute a social media network
Summary
Academic Editors: Hagen Wäsche, Annika Frahsa and Ansgar Thiel. Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Both quantitatively and qualitatively, sports are among young people’s most important social arenas [1,2,3]. In trying to understand the meaning of young athletes’ sports participation, a substantial amount of research shows that the social relations and social experiences young people have in sports are among their main reasons for taking part in sports [4,5]. There are several studies on what these social relations look like [6,7]
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