Abstract
The paper presents the importance of monitoring participation in sports and physical activities. In fact, the regular practice of physical activity brings physical, psychological and social benefits. The Governments should support the measures taken in this field by the monitoring, control work, preparation of appropriate tools and platforms, evaluation and research. We analyse the results from Special Eurobarometer survey (2014) and discuss their limits, suggesting new strategies to improve their use to individualize patterns and rankings of the 28 EU countries in sports participation. For this purpose, we did not analyse issued results, but reprocess the individual record file in a different way, using COMPASS strategy to help us. We applied a multivariate statistical model (logistic regression) to study which are the determinants of sport participation in the European Union.
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Notes
- 1.
According to the results for the three components (quality, quantity and organization), the COMPASS levels of participation are: (1) regular sport, (2) regular recreation, (3) almost-regular sport, (4) almost-regular recreation, (5) irregular, (6) occasional, and (7) nonparticipation.
- 2.
At least three times per week.
- 3.
Porro (2013) proposed a welfare typology for the European Union’s state members using this classification: “corporative” (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands); “social democratic” (Denmark, Finland, and Sweden); “ex-communist” (Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia); “family” (Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, and Spain); and “liberal” (Great Britain and Ireland).
- 4.
For these three questions, the possible answers (with their relative scores) were: “totally disagree” (−2); “tend to disagree” (−1); “tend to agree” (+1); “totally agree” (+2); and “don’t know” (0; also includes missing answers).
- 5.
The ranking in the third question is reversed, as people with favourable conditions should tend to reply negatively to this question.
- 6.
***p < 0.001; **p < 0.01; *p < 0.05. If the coefficient is not significant, the cell is empty.
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Mussino, A., Cosmai, R. (2019). Sports and Physical Activities in Europe: How to Measure Active Lifestyles. In: Bianco, A., Conigliaro, P., Gnaldi, M. (eds) Italian Studies on Quality of Life. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 77. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06022-0_25
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