Young people’s lifestyles and the role of sport involvement Wolf-Dietrich Brettschneider/GER
Young people’s lifestyles and the role of sport involvement
by
Wolf-Dietrich Brettschneider
University of Paderborn, Germany
1 Introduction
At first glance, athletics would appear to be in a privileged situation. (1) Athletics can look back on a long tradition in the sports system; (2) athletics can be confident of its public image: For spectators, the media, and sponsors, athletics is extremely attractive.
At second glance, though, we see a different picture. In affluent industrialised nations particularly, fewer and fewer young people are coming into athletics. It’s a paradox: Although the enthusiasm for sport has never been so great, and although there have never been so many young people doing sports as today, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ensure young people’s commitment to specific sports disciplines. In many European countries, the percentage of participation in athletics has been falling for years now. What is the reason for this trend, and how can we stop it? To answer these questions, we first have to look away from athletics, and instead look at the life situations of young people, their lifestyles and their image of sport.
That will indeed be the structure of my paper:
(1) First, I will discuss the conditions in which young people in Europe are growing up today, and then their lifestyles, which reflect the phenomena and changes in modern societies.
(2) The next step will be to analyse youth sports culture, some current trends and the close connection between sport and adolescent lifestyles.
(3) The final step will be to draw conclusions from the analysis regarding the recruitment and integration of the young generation into athletics.
2 Today’s adolescents – reason for hope or group at risk?
Development in adolescence implies two objectives: that of shaping subjectivity and that of integrating the young person into societal structures. Usually this developmental process is bound up with the process of achieving various psycho-social tasks across the teenage years:
Slide: Development tasks
Successful coping with these developmental tasks has become more difficult by the current social transformations and cultural changes observable in many European societies. They also have a significant influence on the formation of young people’s lifestyles and sport involvement.
Young people of today can no longer rely on secure traditional ties such as family or church, or on given standards, social norms and life-patterns. Unlike the generations of their parents and grandparents, modern adolescents are called upon to be the producers of their own biographies and to rely on their own decisions.
This has produced a double-edged sword for adolescents. On the brighter side, the changes have allowed a growing spectrum of biographical options for adolescents. They are seen as members of a carefree “fun society”. Conversely, the search for the real me during this dynamic and intense period of transition has led to a greater susceptibility to disturbed identity formation. The relationship between young people, their lifestyles and the role of sport involvement varies with the interpretation of the young generation’s situation. There is evidence that the development of adolescents – I being made increasingly harder by today’s living circumstances. Rises in psychosomatic problems as well as in deviance and delinquency can be taken as evidence that many adolescents are having difficulties in dealing with the psycho-social strains brought on by tensions and inconsistencies in their developments. Whether adolescents will be able to cope successfully with their developmental tasks, depends largely on two areas: First, confidence in their own abilities and competencies in various areas of life; second, the extent and quality of available personal and social resources for supportive interventions. Based on these assumptions the question arises as to whether active sport participation can contribute to a diminishment of daily burdens and support adolescent development.
Slide: Can sports provide support?
Sports clubs and sports federations tend to answer these questions affirmatively. In promotional brochures and on billboard ads they claim to promote proper psycho-social development in young people, to increase self-esteem, to support the establishment of social relationships. Beside these outcomes they promise to discourage negative behaviours and protect against juvenile delinquency such as violence and experimenting with drugs.
Unfortunately there is no empirical evidence for the assumption that participation in organized and shaping young people.
The results from my own longitudinal study, which are remarkably consistent and clear in their basic direction, in accordance with international findings are the following:
· There are contradictions between expectations, raised by sports organisations, government and politics and reality as uncovered in the empirical data.
· Involvement in sports clubs has not been shown to have a significant effect on the development of psycho-social health in young people.
· The findings do not question the educational and social potential of participation in organized sport.
· The results suggest that participation in organized sport does not so much change young people. Rather does it provide a context in which important experiences can become the foundation for positive adolescent development.
· This positive impact of organized sports activities does not happen automatically. Whether young people benefit from their involvement in sports depends on the quality of intervention programmes.
3 Young people’s lifestyle
So far the role of adolescent sport involvement in a “risk society”. Now let’s proceed to the implications of today’s fun society on young people, their lifestyles and their sports. Just as the standardized biography of former times has been replaced by a patchwork biography, the uniform adolescent lifestyle has given way to a great variety of lifestyles and of sport concept and of sport concepts during adolescence.
As the concept of lifestyle remains somewhat cloudy, let me now turn to a few theoretical remarks on lifestyle and the role of sport involvement in the process of developing lifestyles during adolescence.
Lifestyle can be understood as the entirety of normative orientations and patterns of behaviour of an individual. It is a short and precise descriptor of a person’s attempt as a member of a society to organise his/her life in a specific and therefore distinctive way. The concept of lifestyle provides a means of establishing and portraying one’s individuality, and of gaining access to valued social and cultural groups or subgroups.
The main function of lifestyle, through the adoption of values, roles, memberships, and behaviour patterns, can be seen to be the expression, development, and preservation of one’s personal and social identity.
Lifestyle allows the development of everyday routines that provide stability for the self, but it is also a means of displaying private identity agendas to significant others. This is often most openly manifested in situations in which there is maximum freedom of expression, as in the ways individuals choose to use their leisure time. Sport, physical activity and fitness can be seen as important elements and symbols of lifestyles.
As the traditional value systems have declined without being replaced by strong new alternatives, for many the body has become the last bastion on which to build a reliable sense of identity. Not only has the relationship between the body and identity become stronger, but also the links between the physical and the lifestyles. People are increasingly concerned with the management and appearance of the body, both as a constituent of the self and as a social symbol.
The new emphasis on the body has allowed it to take on the quality of a social power resource. Similar to our money (economic capital), our relationships (social capital), our educational qualifications (cultural capital), the body has a social currency value that can be converted into economic, cultural, and social profit. In short, a sporting, fit and aesthetic body has become a source of power and status in society, which is well reflected in young people’s lifestyles. The improved status of body capital for young people seems directly linked to the increase in importance that sport and physical activity have acquired in youth cultures. This lead us to the role of sport involvement in the daily lives of young people.
4 Sport: A source of fun and achievement
Passivity and inaction are simply not in our nature. Human beings, so says evolutionary biology, are programmed for effort and the desire to overcome. All our organs, senses and skills need constant training if they are to be preserved and remain fully functioning. So apparently useless activities are in fact useful – a paradox that also applies to sport. But activity must also be fun; this applies to work, and it applies to sport. So there is agreement that sport is a source of achievement and fun, and therefore important to modern societies.
Are we all talking about the same thing, though, when we speak of sport? Hardly. What we are currently witnessing is a redefinition of sport, perhaps even the emergence of a completely new identity. Sport is more than the sum of institutionalised sports and sport disciplines. Today, sport is not only what sports associations would like it to be seen as, but above all what people, especially young people, subjectively feel sport to be.
The shift in values that sport is currently undergoing amounts to a change in generations. It is the younger generation that is deciding the emphasis. In youth sports culture, activities with an aura of action, thrill, fun and entertainment are “in”. In the YOZ – the youth-only zone –fun sport, extreme sport, adventure sport and risk sport have all become synonymous with sport itself.
However, despite these changes, we must not lose sight of the fact that traditional sports disciplines like athletics still continue to shape the image of sport that adolescents have. Since traditional sports disciplines in Europe are linked with clubs, it makes sense to begin by investigating the situation of sports clubs and their attractiveness for young people in general.
· Sports clubs, whose downfall has been predicted by many, are the no. 1 youth organisation in many European countries.
· In Germany, approximately every second adolescent between 12 and 18 years of age is a member of a sports club.
· In Europe, the level of participation has been stagnating at a high level for 20 years.
· But within the sports system, there are changes that look like a zero sum game. One discipline’s gain is another’s loss. Traditional sports such as athletics, gymnastics and handball are quite clearly on the losing side.
· What adolescents expect of clubs is obvious: They are not looking for a social group experience, but an individual fun experience. The trend could be summed up as moving away from group solidarity and more towards fun club. The motto: “Not a lot of club, but a lot of fun”.
· Adolescents want a sport that leaves them scope for self-organisation, spontaneity and creativeness. That is the reason why more and more subcultures are forming, even in sport. The distinctive features of these “scenes”: No fixed timetable where possible, no preprogrammed, standardized settings; but above all: no control by adults.
· My next point will be to reject a frequent preconception. For the present young generation, sport also needs to be linked with achievement, or it won’t be fun. So the activities they seek are ones that promise immediate gratification in the form of fun and a sense of well-being. The fun and success that come with years of training, endurance and asceticism are less attractive. This is the first explanation for why traditional sports disciplines are losing support and why young people do not find athletics very attractive.
· However, sporting activities not only need to be fun, they also have to provide excitement and risk – at any rate, they have to combat boredom. For young people, there is nothing worse than boredom. The increasing attractiveness of the kinds of sports that promise thrills is the answer to the “search for excitement in an unexciting society”. In a world where we are cushioned against all the risks and vagaries of life by insurance policies, young people feel prompted to expose themselves voluntarily to risks and danger. What they are seeking is the “ultimate kick”. Boredom arises when people are under-stretched and unhappy about it.
· Sport is a showcase for the cult of the body. In an age when sensuous experiences are few and far between, a person’s own body has a special significance. In this context, I would name two aspects of body perception that belong together: One is a body that signalises physical fitness, the other is an attractive, aesthetic body that we can present to others. Both aspects promise social recognition and prestige in the adolescent’s key socialisation agent – the peer group.
5 The relationship between sport and lifestyle
Physical activity and sport provide an arena for displaying the importance of appearance and of the performing aspects of the body and of young people’s lifestyles.
An illustrative insight into the relationship between sports, the physical self with its two facets, physical attractiveness and physical ability, and emerging lifestyles is provided by a comparative analysis of the beach volleyball and three-by-three basketball “scenes”.
Beach Volleyball
Both scenes are characterised by a synthesis of sports culture, the cult of the body, and a young lifestyle. Well-trained bodies, brand-name clothes in the season’s fashion colours, sun-glasses by Oakley or adidas, and a specific type of music create an almost erotic atmosphere in beach volleyball. At the same time, this is a lifestyle to be found predominantly among highschool boys and girls from affluent families.
Streetball-Foto
Every bit as popular, but in many ways completely different, is three-by-three basketball, played on the street, in ghettos and in communal yards. Bodies are not shown off for status, but shrouded in mainly cheaper, darker and oversized sports clothes. The background sound to “cool” actions is rap or hiphop. Here too, there is a specific lifestyle – one found more among adolescents located on the lower rungs of the social ladder. An analysis of the snowboarder and surfer, or rollerblader and skater scenes would show up the connection between sport, body concept and lifestyle in the young generation in a similar manner.