Abstract

If you ask young people in Germany what they feel to be of value in their leisure time, sport activity ranks very high. Only a minority of youngsters confesses not to like and not to practice any sport, obligatory sport lessons in school excepted. Findings presented and discussed here any mainly based on two cross-sectional surveys, covering both a representative sample of the young generation from school grade 3 resp. 7 to grade 13, which is age 8 resp. 12 to 18. Data for the first survey (N=3630) were collected in 1992 in North-Rhine-Westphalia, for the second (N=3426) in 1995(96 in North-Rhine-Westphalia and Brandenburg. On a first level of interpretation our data show a broad (and increasing) variety of forms and settings of sport activity with the young (Kurz & Tietjens 2000). Formal sport disciplines, competitive sports and the organizational frame-work of clubs are loosing their dominance while "softer", life-style-oriented sports, embedded in different youth cultures, gain importance. Nevertheless, doing competitive sport as a member of a club´s team till now seems to offer the best conditions for practicing sport regularly. Looking behind this variance of forms and settings, we find, on a second level of interpretation, personal attributes (e.g. talent) and social determinants, the most effective of the latter being age, sex, school career, nationality and living area. On average, sport activity reaches its top (measured in subjective importance and time spent) with age 12, and then decreasing dramatically, about 50% till age 18. Girls with low level of school career, living in big cities have the worst preconditions for involving in sport and developing a physically active life-style, esp. if their parents are not German. In Germany, after reunification, it is of special interest to compare living conditions in Eastern (former GDR) with those in Western Federal States. Young people in Brandenburg (East) in 1995/6 had dramatically worse chances to find their way into regular sport activity than in North-Rine-Westphalia (West). On a third level of interpretation we found correlations between sport activity on the one and personal attributes on the other sice. Summarizing, there are statistically significant, but weak correlations with self-esteem, body concept, social support, healthy risk-behaviours and symptoms of psychosocial and physical health all indicating that young people involved in sport are to be found, on average, on the bright side of life. These correlations were stronger with those young people who were involved in regular, typically: competitive sport as member of a club. Of course, in a cross-sectional study you, principally, cannot decide whether this is due to socialisation or to selection. But there is some evidende that these are not only effects of selection. Verf.-Referat