The role of individual resources, health behaviour and age perception as determinants of sports participation in older age

Abstract

Sports participation contributes to maintaining health and wellbeing in old age, hence a deeper understanding of its various determinants is necessary. Previous research has primarily focused on either the effects of individual resources or age-specific attitudes to sports participation. However, a deeper understanding of the inter-relationships between these variables is required to develop effective policies to promote sports participation in ageing societies. To address the hypothesised inter-relationships, we consider both individual resources as well as age-specific attitudes and behaviours in order to integrate them simultaneously in our analysis. Furthermore, the analysis will be differentiated according to the three social status groups. The sample contains 1,560 retired persons, aged 65 years and older, based on the fifth wave (2014) of the German Ageing Survey. Multiple Poisson regression models were estimated to test our hypotheses. After adjusting for demographic variables, greater individual resources are associated with more regular sports participation. The findings also reveal that positive age perception and healthy behaviours are related to sports participation. Slight mediation effects between the different variables can be observed. Furthermore, the effect structures vary across different social status groups. The findings show that both individual resources and age-specific behaviours and attitudes are independent determinants of sports participation in older age. Our results confirm slight inter-relationships between socio-economic resources and age-specific attitudes.