469.1
Statistical Analysis of the Sport Participation in a Population : Some Sociological and Software Considerations
Statistical Analysis of the Sport Participation in a Population : Some Sociological and Software Considerations
Tuesday, July 15, 2014: 3:30 PM
Room: 412
Oral Presentation
Estimating the sport participation rate in a given population raises the question of defining what it means “to be sporty”. From 1970 to 1990, new forms of sport practice appeared that forced the sociologists involved in general population surveys to enlarge the usual definition in order to really get a whole understanding of the sport phenomenon. The goal is now not only to evaluate the hard core formed by the sociohistorical duet “training and competing” but to go further so as to include softer and more ephemeral physical activity forms. In fine, a scale of the respondent investment in the sport and physical activities is designed, representing a progression from no practice at all to the usual sport participation in its sociohistorical meaning. To this end, the interviewing mode has changed to an emic-and-etic dual approach.
Sociologists aim to discover the sociological, cultural, demographical characteristics which may influence this sporting scale. A suitable statistical toolkit readily available in an easy-to-use computing environment is thus needed. No doubt that contingency table analysis is the fundamental technique used by sociologists. The distribution-free pointG software proposes some modern approaches for dealing with two-way tables (Yule’s Q, confidence intervals, local and global effect sizes, modality profiles) suitable for a sociological quantitative data analysis, and is specifically powerful in producing statistical graphics.
Finally, explanatory methods appropriate to the researcher’s goals (Wheaton, 2003) enable to detect and visualize (Ely, 1999) the sociological, cultural, demographical effects in the 2010 general survey of the sport practices in the French population.