A Study of Women's Attitude towards Sport Participation and its Effective Socio-Psychological Factors

Today, sport is considered as a basic need in all over the world. Participation in sport activities professionally, until recently was a male activity and women had no significant contribution in sport activities. After World War II, however, women's disposition to sport activities changed, because of factors such as improvements in leisure time, living standards, attention to health and fitness, mass media effects, paying more attention to sport achievements, and change in traditional gender roles. However, despite the importance and necessity of sport participation for women, women's participation in sport activities is still limited as a global rule. For example, sport participation rates for women is 56% in Britain and 59.9% in Australia. In the US, more than 55.2% of the population of women are overweight on the basis of body mass index. In addition, 37.9% of the American women don’t have any physical activity during the week. Sport participation of women is not also satisfactory in Iran and the results of some national surveys show that, about 41.2% of Iranian women do get more or less involved in sport activities but others do not. Many reasons have been proposed to explain women unwillingness to participate in sport activities. They can be classified into three main categories including practical, personal and socio-cultural barriers, and also many studies have been conducted to investigate influential factors on women’s sport participation. In the categories of personal and socio-cultural barriers, rarely have been studied the factors that influence women’s attitude towards participation in sport activities. So, the main goal of the present research is to investigate the relationship between social trust, self-esteem and instrumental personality and women’s attitude towards sport participation in Iran. The research is a survey study. Research population include all women aged 15-30 in Jahrom in Fars province. Sample size is 336 individuals who were selected by means of random multi-stage sampling method. The measurement tool is a set of four researcher-made questionnaires including attitude towards sport participation (2 dimensions and 12 items), social trust (2 dimensions and 10 items), self-esteem (2 dimensions and 10 items) and instrumental personality based on Talcott Parsons’s theory (3 dimensions and 15 items). The Validity of the scales was measured using factor analysis technique. Based on the results, KMO test is 0.79 for attitude towards sport participation, 0.73 for social trust scale, 0.74 for self-esteem scale, and finally 0.66 for instrumental personality scale, which show that the sampling is adequate. Moreover, Bartlett test, is significant for all scales, suggesting that there exist significant correlations among variables. In total, the factor analysis ultimately led to delete 2 items of attitude towards sport participation, 2 items of social trust, 4 items of self-esteem and 7 items of instrumental personality scales. Discussion of Results and In total, 336 individuals answered our questions. The mean age of respondents is 22.6 years old and the mean years of education is 13 years. 194 respondents (57.7%) were single and 142 (42.3%) were married. 271 respondents (80.7%) were unemployed and 65(19.3%) were employed. 95 respondents (28.3%) had one or more children and 241(71.7%) had no child. On the basis of the scales results, the mean of attitude towards sport participation was 29.2 (within a range of 10-50), the mean of social trust was 18.8 (within a range of 8-40), the means of self-esteem was 16.8 (within a range of 6-30) and the mean of instrumental personality was 25.4 (within a range of 8-40). Based on the descriptive research findings, we can say that the mean score for attitude towards sport participation is low in Iran. This finding is compatible with other studies in which women's sport participation is not satisfactory in Iran. For the purpose of evaluating the relationship between independent variables and dependent variable, namely attitude towards sport participation, multivariate regression analysis was used, the results of which are presented in Table No. 1. On the basis of the figures shown in Table 1, we can say that there is a positive significant relationship between social trust and age with attitude towards sport participation and there is no significant relationship between instrumental personality, self-esteem, marital status, having children or not, education and occupation with attitude toward sport participation. The results also show that social trust and age are able to explain about. 09% of the variance of the attitude towards sport participation. Although a positive and significant relationship between social trust and women’s attitude toward sport participation is compatible with theoretical framework, lack of significant relationship between instrumental personality and self-esteem with the attitude towards sport participation is not compatible with theoretical framework. Therefore, it should be considered and justified in terms of socio-cultural situation of women in Iran.