Skateparks as a health‐resource: are they as dangerous as they look?

Abstract

Skateboarding raises an interesting dilemma in the field of health promotion. While public health institutions are engaged in unprecedented efforts to counter the sedentary lifestyles of youth, the promotion of lifestyle sports and active leisure practices, such as skateboarding, is tempered by the potential risks of injuries. The health‐risks associated with skateboarding have generally been viewed through the lens of epidemiology. Sociology, on the other hand, has yet to provide research on injuries that meshes with this literature. This paper addresses this absence by drawing on the works of Pierre Bourdieu to present a different perspective on the health benefits and injuries associated with skateparks. Using his concepts of ‘physical capital’ and ‘social capital’, the analysis consists of 388 days of observation (mean of 35 days in 11 skateparks) and 23 in‐depth interviews with male and female skaters in Montreal, Canada. Its findings indicate that few serious injuries occurred in these skateparks and that these spaces do not correspond to the image depicted of skateboarding in previous research. From this, we suggest that skateparks should be conceived as a valuable health‐resource for youth because they provide various social, psychological and physical resources that encourage a safe and active lifestyle.

Keywords:

• sociology
• Pierre Bourdieu
• skateboarding
• injury
• parks
• youth

Acknowledgements

We thank Annie Geneau (Université de Montréal), Sylvie Lepage (Ville de Montréal), Claude Goulet (Université Laval) and Benoît Tremblay (Ministère de l’Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport) for their valuable input during this study.

Notes

1. Because the body is a central feature in his theory, he refers to one’s ‘relation to the body’ to express the ways of treating the body, caring for it, feeding it and maintaining it (Bourdieu, 1984).

2. In order to avoid any mechanistic reading of the influence of specific variables, his notion of social classes refers to any conditions of existence shared by members of a social group which engender a relatively homogeneous vision‐of‐the‐world (Bourdieu, 1984).

3. We deliberately selected the interviewees in order to have a heterogeneous group of participants. Thus, the sample was not representative of the 422 skaters observed in the quantitative part of the study.

4. All quotes were translated from French to English and are represented by a pseudonym, age of the participant and the years of skateboarding of experience.

5. Bourdieu (1986) defines social capital as ‘the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalised relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition or – in other words, to membership in a group (p. 248).

6. Note that the supervised skateparks which provided various activities had clearly higher attendance than those who were not supervised.

7. Translation by the author.