SPORTS PRACTICES AND VIOLENCE AMONG YOUNG MOROCCANS FROM DIFFERENT SOCIAL CLASSES: A SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

The practice of sport is certainly characterised by a desire to go beyond ones abilities in order to achieve a good performance. Within this framework, we can often witness intense interactions that could easily tip over into different forms of violence. This sociological study is part of this context, and its aim is to focus on the impact of social representations on violence in sport. The aim of our research is, on the one hand, to identify the types of violence in relation to the properties of each sport and, on the other hand, to study the impact of the groups to which one belongs (socio-cultural aspect) on the construction of social representations in relation to the practice of competitive sport and, more specifically, violent behaviour. Three competitive sports were chosen: tennis, judo and football. social. The selected population consisted of 113 young amateur athletes, 15 parents and 06 coaches. We opted for a mixed approach to our research methodology, using both questionnaire and interview techniques. Analysis of the quantitative data showed that each sport was dominated by a particular social category. In football, 75% of participants belonged to a disadvantaged social class. Judo seems to attract young people from an average social category (62%), whereas in tennis 69% of participants belong to a privileged social class. The second observation concerns the distribution of the typology of violence, which seems to follow the logic of a socio-cultural distribution in terms of social class.