The Transmission of Sport Mobility Orientation in the Family

Abstract

A common hypothesis derived from various theoretical standpoints in sociology states that the family is the most important agent in socializing youth to the cultural values of the larger society. This paper examines this hypothesis through an ex ploration of the extent to which families involved in a community baseball program appear to be transmitting to their sons values concerning sports as a possible mo bility route. The way sports has been used as a path to mobility has been recognized in a number of contexts. What is not known is how youth come to value sports as an important, valuable, and meaningful occupational path to pursue. Using in dependent indicators of parents' and children's orientations to mobility through sport we examined the amount of parent-child agreement on this issue and how these linkages are affected when we control for common structural forces and sub stantively and theoretically meaningful conditions. Our findings show only modest support for the notion that families are important influences on children's sport mobility orientations in the community baseball context. What little evidence for value transmission that was found occurred among those children we characterized as being "out of character" with the game. An alternative explanation we pro posed was that the transmission process is actually a two-way process in which children socialized parents and vice versa. This explanation was also found to be unsatisfactory, as it was clear that other factors were also important; particularly race and social class background. More research needs to be done that addresses how these larger structural forces come to impact upon children and their sports play. Future research should consider how other agencies of socialization combine and interact with the family to socialize youth in the sports context.