The German and the Swiss Club

Abstract

The paper reports of a comparison of two empirical surveys on the sociology of the sport club conducted in the Federal Republic of Germany and Switzerland. A questionnaire constructed at the University of Karlsruhe was used to interview a random sample of about 3,000 club members and 3,200 functionaries representa tive for the Federal Republic. Together with the "Research Institute of the Swiss School for Physical Education and Sport" this instrument was adapted to suit Swiss conditions and used in a sample of about 420 club members in German-spea king Switzerland.

The main question was to ascertain if the most important results from the intensive correlation analysis of the German data (e.g. degree of activity of mem bers. sport motivation, attitude to organization, mechanisms of integration, dis satisfactions, honorary work within the club, correlations between sport activity and social contacts, wishes concerning kinds of sport offered etc.) are transferable to the Swiss situation. After the first global comparison of the two sets of data, with reference to the above-mentionad criteria, however, there appeared to be so many differences between the German and the Swiss sport club members that such a transfer would hardly be possible.

Whilst looking for explanations, it became apparent that these differences were the result of the partly topographically caused composition of the samples according to the type of sport club and the kinds of sport which had been taken into account. If one took only those German clubs from the more extensive data into consideration which corresponded in structure most nearly to the Swiss set of data, then almost all the differences between members, which had at first been observed, and could have been interpreted as cultural influences on the populations, disappeared.

The structural differences with regard to organization which exist between the two countries do, of course, require further explanation and one could here perhaps take cultural variables into consideration. It becomes clear, however, that there is a great danger that differences between personal data in international studies may all too quickly be explained as being subject to cultural influence if one does not have the possibility of controlling the samples according to organiza tional and structural similarity.