Gender Differences in Brazilian Children's Socialization into Sport

Abstract

In an attempt to apply a social role-social systems approach to study the sport socialization process of children. a fixed-alternative questionnaire was administered to Brazilian children in Sāo Paulo. When testing the general model, results from multiple regression analyses on 94 males and 77 females revealed that values of parents, family, peers, opportunity set and teachers strongly influenced the process of becoming involved in sport. Stepwise regressions revealed that the model was a better predictor of female sport involvement, with opportunity set and female siblings providing the strongest influence. In the case of males, parents' values, fathers and brothers proved to be the strongest contributing factors. Although not dissimilar to findings on North American children, results from this study suggest that there may be some unique features of sport socialization with respect to Brazilian children. These findings are discussed in light of those from previous research studies in Canada and the United States.

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