Participation Motives of Sport and Exercise Maintainers: Influences of Age and Gender

Clemens Ley
Additional contact information
Clemens Ley: Institute for Sport Science, University of Vienna, 1150 Vienna, Austria

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 21, 1-13

Abstract: Promotion of physical activity has become a global priority for public health. While many people do not adhere to the recommendations, sport and exercise maintainers have found their right or fitting practice. Thus, assessing and knowing the participation motives across maintainers helps to improve our understanding of the sports and exercise practices and, thus, to recommend and to design physical activities and programmes that fit to individuals’ motives. A modified version of the Bernese Motive and Goal Inventory was used in an Austria-wide cross-sectional study with 10646 sport and exercise maintainers (43% female). The study performed confirmatory factor analysis, examined measurement invariance, and compared participation motives. The results showed a good model fit and measurement invariance, indicating that the inventory can be applied independently of gender, age and years of sport/exercise experiences. Motives differed among gender, age and type of sports/exercise. Therefore, these variables should be considered in tailoring sport recommendations and interventions to promote adherence. Finally, the results are discussed by using the Self-Determination Theory indicating that sport and exercise maintainers pursue predominantly motives with intrinsic goal contents.

Keywords: physical activity promotion; motivation; behaviour change; sport participation; exercise adherence; self-determination theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/21/7830/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/21/7830/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:17:y:2020:i:21:p:7830-:d:434846

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().