Social Stratification and Sports’ Participation in England

Abstract

Using a latent class analysis, we identify distinct typologies of sports’ consumers in England and then determine whether the socio-economic makeup of the latent classes resemble recent scholarly work across different cultural and leisure fields. The third part of the analysis provides a nuanced rigorous statistical evaluation of the subtle socio-economic differences between the active sports’ clusters. Our analysis is unique with few studies, if any, identifying and then examining types of sports consumers in this way. The findings largely corroborate research in other cultural and leisure fields, although there are distinctive types of consumers’ specific to sport along gender lines, and a group which consumes highbrow sports but when compared to other types of sports’ consumers, do not exclusively come from the higher social strata.

Keywords:

• fitness
• highbrows
• omnivores
• social stratification
• sport consumption

Notes

Homology is the relationship between social class position and cultural consumption (Bourdieu, 1984).

Habitus is a set of dispositions which generate practices and perceptions, through socialization and education (Bourdieu, 1984).

We decided to test alternative models and include local dependencies for some of the sporting items to determine whether we still got a five cluster solution. In all cases, we obtained the same cluster solution and, therefore, decided to continue with the original model as no violation of assumptions was evident.

TABLE 2 Results of the estimated cluster models, covariates included (TPS 2005–06)

In total, 20 regressions are simultaneously run (where each cluster is the reference category and simultaneously compared against the other four clusters). This is akin to a series of simultaneous multinomial regressions. For ease of interpretation, only the partial results from the MIMIC model are shown in Table 5 (the most substantively interesting). The full set of regression models is available from the authors on request.

TABLE 5 MIMIC Model regression results differentiating between the active sports’ classes, Odds ratios (TPS 2005–06)