Children's Attitudes Toward Physical Activity: Organized Sports Participants Versus Nonorganized Sports Participants

Helping children form positive attitudes toward physical activity (PA) is an important objective in physical education (NASPE, 2004), and identifying factors associated with children's attitudes toward PA will contribute to meeting this objective. While some studies have compared children's attitudes toward PA between groups categorized by sex, grade, and fitness level, further studies examining other factors are needed. The purpose of this study was to compare children's attitudes toward PA between organized sports participants and those who did not participate in organized sports (non-organized sports participants). The Children's Attitude Toward Physical Activity (CATPA) inventory (Schutz, Smoll, Carre, & Mosher, 1985) was administered to 199 middle school children, and 96 organized sports participants and 103 non-organized sports participants were identified with a survey of organized sports participation completed twice by the participants at a one-month interval. Coefficient alphas for eight subdomains of CATPA ranged from .77 to .94, and the agreement between the two surveys was 95.47%. When the mean scores on the eight subdomains were ranked, it was found that the rankings for the top three subdomains with the most positive attitudes (health & fitness: value, social continuation, health & fitness: enjoyment) and bottom three subdomains with the least positive attitudes (aesthetic, ascetic, vertigo) were the same for both groups; the only difference in ranking was that social growth and cathartic were ranked 4^th and 5^th in the organized sports group, but 5^th and 4^th in the non-organized sports group. However, one-way MANOVA identified significantly more positive attitudes on the part of the organized sports group in four of the eight subdomains of CATPA with the control of Type I error: (a) social growth (M: 22.67 for organized sports group vs. 20.69 for non-organized sports group, F_{(1, 197)} = 26.36, p < .001), (b) social continuation (23.20 vs. 21.67, F_{(1, 197)} = 11.20, p = .001), (c) health & fitness: value (24.4 vs. 23.53, F_{(1, 197)} = 8.43, p = .004, and (d) health & fitness: enjoyment (22.87 vs. 21.31, F_{(1, 197)} = 10.63, p = .001). The findings indicate that, although both groups recognize health/fitness and social benefits of PA most, organized sports participants demonstrate even more positive attitude toward these benefits than do non-organized sports participants. It seems that providing more opportunities of participation in organized sports for children might help them form more positive attitudes toward the health/fitness and social subdomains of PA.
Keyword(s): exercise/fitness/physical activity, middle school issues, research