Young adults’ perceptions of the relevance of interaction on social online networks for sports activities

Abstract

In our mediatised world, social media has become increasingly important as a distinct environment for facilitating juvenile developmental tasks, allowing for communication, self-staging, or information seeking. Increasing social media activity is often explicated as displacing participation in sports, although current studies report rather independent or enhancing relations between social media use and sports participation. Online social networks such as Facebook and Instagram constitute a specific social media application and contain a broad variety of sports-related content, ranging from visual representations of sports, sharing of training plans, and recommendations for muscle development, to discussions about sporting equipment. Nevertheless, the impact of these contents on sports activities has been largely neglected in scientific contexts. Against the background of the socialisation theory and uses and gratifications approach, the aim of this study is to analyse the users’ perceptions of the relevance of their sports-related interaction on social networks for sports activities from a relativist and constructivist grounding. In qualitative interviews with young adults (n = 10), organisational, motivational, and professionalising implications of interaction on social networks were perceived as relevant for participating in sports. Besides, critical remarks were mentioned, mainly highlighting the lack of transparency, the poor quality of information, and the social pressure to play sports.

Keywords:

• Social media
• sports
• socialisation
• uses and gratifications
• young adulthood

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Ball games: handball, soccer, (beach) volleyball; fitness/endurance: Freeletics, boot camp training, bike racing and mountain biking; trend sports: parkour, rock climbing and bouldering.

2 This social media phenomenon is called ‘bro(thers)-science’ indicating that knowledge and information is mainly from peers and non-experts (Döring, 2016, p. 5)