Research Paper- MLA Format

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Women’s Precollege Sports Participation, Enjoyment of Sports, and Self-esteem

David R. Shaffer & Erin Wittes

Published online: 16 November 2006 # Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2006

Abstract This study tested a model that specifies that the psychosocial impact of women’s precollege sports partici- pation depends on the quality of their sports experience, that is, on participants’ enjoyment of sports and the benefits derived from athletic pursuits. A sample of 245 college women (mean age=19.9 years) provided retrospective reports of their precollege sports involvement as well as assessments of their enjoyment of sports, perceived physical competence, body image, gender role orientation, and self-esteem. Consistent with past research, women students’ precollege sport participation was a modest predictor of their self-esteem in bivariate analyses. Fol- low-up analyses revealed that enjoyment of sports mediated the sports participation/self-esteem relationship and implied that female participants who find sports less enjoyable may be at risk of experiencing declining self-esteem. However, enjoyment of sports explained little unique variance in global self-esteem after we controlled for the influence of other sports-related benefits (e.g., improved physical competence). Implications for those who hope to help more girls reap psychosocial benefits from sporting activities are discussed.

Keywords Sports . Enjoyment . Self-esteem

Sports and sporting activities play a prominent role in many persons’ lives. Millions of spectators passionately track the fortunes of their favorite teams and athletes, and a sizable number of sports enthusiasts participate in one or more

athletic activities, either as formal participants in athletic competitions or for recreational purposes. What benefits do people derive from sporting activities, and to what extent does their own participation influence their sense of self ?

Reasons for participating in sports are many and varied, including, but not limited to, enjoyment of the activity, peer and parental influence, presumed health benefits of partic- ipation, and an increase in physical conditioning/well-being (e.g., Battista, 1990; Brustad, 1988; Cote, 1999; Holland & Andre, 1994; Scanlan & Lewthwaite, 1986; Snyder & Spreitzer, 1979). Among the most common presumed psychosocial benefits of sports participation is an enhanced sense of self-worth. Research on male samples is generally consistent with the latter assertion, which suggests that sports participation may have both short-term and long- term effects on persons’ self-esteem (e.g., Pascarella & Smart, 1991; Spretizer, 1994; Taylor, 1995; Vilhjamsson & Thorlindsson, 1992).

Our focus in the present research centers on a presumed motivation for participating in sports and psychosocial benefits of such sports participation in young women. Several researchers have noted that sports and athletic activities are still generally considered to be a masculine domain (e.g., Koivula, 1999; Shaw, Kleiber, & Caldwell, 1995) and that girls may have difficulty reconciling the physical and competitive nature of sports with their emerging feminine self-concepts (Eccles, Barber, Jozefowicz, Malenchuk, & Vida, 1999). Yet, girls’ and women’s participation in athletics has increased dramatically in the past 30 years (Schultz & Fish, 1998), owing, in part, to the passage and enforcement of Title IX (Grant, 1995), a federal law passed in 1972 that bans discrimination on the basis of gender in federally funded institutions. Moreover, encouragement of girls to participate in sports is apparent in such popular cultural appeals as the late 1990s advertising campaign by

Sex Roles (2006) 55:225–232 DOI 10.1007/s11199-006-9074-3

This article is based on a Master’s thesis conducted by the second author under the direction of the first author.

D. R. Shaffer (*) : E. Wittes Department of Psychology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA e-mail: dshaffer@uga.edu

Nike that featured young girls pleading “If you let me play sports” and then citing various health and psychosocial benefits that purportedly result from sport participation, including an enhanced sense of self-esteem.

Sports Participation and Girls’ Self-esteem

Previous research on the relationship between girls’ sports participation and self-esteem is limited and somewhat inconsistent. Several researchers have reported bivariate relationships that indicate that girls (and boys in mixed- gender samples) who participate in sports have higher self- esteem than those who do not (Butcher, 1989; Centre for Research on Girls and Women in Sport, 1997; Koivula, 1999; Rao & Overman, 1986; Taylor, 1995). Other researchers have reported that whether sports participation is positively or negatively related to participants’ self-esteem is moderated by participants’ gender role orientations and the nature of the sporting activity; for example, individuals with a feminine gender role orientation are most likely to derive a sense of self-worth from participating in noncompetitive than in competitive sports (Bowker, Gadbois & Cornock, 2003). Yet, it is worth noting that sports participation has been, at best, a modest predictor of global self-esteem for partic- ipants of either sex (e.g., Jackson & Marsh, 1986; Richman & Shaffer, 2000; Spreitzer, 1994).

Jackson and Marsh (1986) suggested that sports partic- ipation influences self-esteem indirectly by enhancing such sports-related contributors to self-worth as perceived physical competence and a favorable body image. Recent research with a female sample supported this viewpoint (Richman & Shaffer, 2000). Specifically, a positive bivariate relationship between girls’ participation in sports in high school and their self-esteem during the college years was mediated by the favorable impact of sport participation on participants’ perceived physical competence, body image, and masculinity and that in the absence of such “benefits,” sport participation was associated with lower levels of self-esteem (see also Marsh, 1998, for similar results among sample of elite athletes). Thus, one reason that relationships between sports participation and self- esteem are often modest is that sports affect girls in different ways and seem to enhance self-worth only to the extent that they promote other contributors to self-esteem.

Sport Enjoyment and Self-esteem

Although sports participants of both sexes cite health benefits and social stimulation as reasons for participating in sports, the most frequently cited motive participants give is affective or evaluative in character: Sports are “fun,” “exciting,” or “activities that I enjoy” (e.g., Battista, 1990; Scanlan & Lewthwaite, 1986; Snyder & Spreitzer, 1979). This finding suggests an interesting motivational model of girls’ sports participation that, to our knowledge, has not been evaluated. Perhaps the positive relationship between girls’ sport participation and self-esteem is mediated (or moderated) by the extent to which girls report that they enjoy sporting activities. Far fewer girls than boys regularly participate in sports (Centre for Research on Girls and Women, 1997; Eccles & Barber, 1999), and their partici- pation often stems from formal and informal inducements to participate from gym teachers, parents, siblings, or peers. We propose that girls who discover that they enjoy sporting activities during childhood or adolescence may experience gains in self-esteem from their participation, whereas those who derive little enjoyment from sports participation may benefit little from, or even suffer psychosocially from, continued involvement in activities they dislike or perhaps think of as stereotypically masculine endeavors. Indeed, Bem and Lenney (1976) found that partaking in behaviors perceived to be more appropriate for members of the other sex is often discomforting and produces negative feelings about the self. Thus, one goal of the present research was to evaluate the simple but straightforward mediating/moder- ating model depicted in Fig. 1 —a model that specifies that sports participation fosters the self-esteem of young women who report that they enjoy sporting activities and that, at lower levels of enjoyment, partaking in sporting activities may actually undermine self-esteem.

Of course, empirical support for the above hypotheses raises the issue of why girls might come to enjoy (or to derive little enjoyment from) sporting activities in the first place. We hypothesized that girls who come to enjoy sports the most are those who can point to clear benefits that they receive from their participation. Such benefits may be many and varied, although it is likely that sports-related enhance- ments to such personal attributes as physical competence, a favorable body image, and socially desirable masculine characteristics such as assertiveness and a healthy sense of

Fig. 1 Path model of the pro- posed relationships among pre- college sports participation, enjoyment of sports, and self- esteem during the college years.

226 Sex Roles (2006) 55:225–232

competition, contribute heavily to girls’ enjoyment of sports and to any enhanced sense of self-worth they may experience from their participation. A related corollary is that girls who fail to experience such benefits derive little…