Reassessing the Relationship Between High School Sports Participation and Deviance: Evidence of Enduring, Bifurcated Effects

Abstract

Despite its long-standing popular appeal, the idea that athletic activity is a deterrent to crime and delinquency suffers from a distinct lack of empirical support. This article tests the hypothesis that the relationship between high school sports participation and deviance varies by both type of deviant behavior and level of athletic involvement. The analysis is based upon longitudinal data focusing on the effects of involvement in high school sports, the country's largest institutional setting for youth sports participation, in early adulthood. We find that the relationship between athletic involvement and deviance varies significantly depending upon the deviant behaviors examined. Specifically, we find that shoplifting decreases with sports participation, while drunken driving increases. Moreover, these effects extend further into the life course (age 30) than has been demonstrated in any previous study and hold across all our measures of sports participation. Several potential explanatory mechanisms are evaluated. The implications of these enduring, bifurcated effects are discussed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Jeylan Mortimer and Christopher Uggen for their assistance in gathering the data used in this article, as well as members of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Training Grant Work Group for their helpful comments. The Youth Development Study is supported by grants (“Work Experience and Mental Health: A Panel Study of Youth”) from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD44138) and the NIMH (MH42843). The authors also received support from an NRSA-NIMH award, “Mental Health and Adjustment in the Life Course,” (MH19893).

NOTES

Notes

¹ One exception has come in the context of program evaluations of the recent wave of sport and recreation-based crime prevention programs, the so-called “social problems industry” in sport; however, efforts at evaluation have been often very limited and lacking in appropriate scientific controls or comparisons (Witt and Crompton 1997; Nichols and Crow 2004). Thus, the general scholarly consensus is that we still lack reliable evidence as to the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of such sport and recreation-based interventions (Sherman et al. 1998; Mulvey, Arthur, and Reppucci 2004). Even strong public advocates of sport and recreation-based interventions have been forced to concede that “there is a lack of robust evidence of the direct impact of sport and physical activity on antisocial behavior and the sustainability of any outcomes” (Morris et al. 2003:2). For more on the challenges of program evaluation, see Baldwin (2000).

² Criminologists and economists have not explicitly theorized the sports-deviance link as far as we are aware. However, if sport is treated as part of the larger landscape of after-school activities or structured (and unstructured) leisure time, mechanisms and theories from other work correspond to Dunning's bifocal model. For example, using measures of relatively minor criminal behavior similar to those used in this paper, Hirschi (1969) argued those more involved in conventional activities were less likely to participate in illegal behavior. Other theoretical work on routine activities (Cohen and Felson 1979) argues that daily patterns of behavior and interaction are associated with criminal offending. In a series of works, Osgood and colleagues advance this tradition by concluding that individuals with more unstructured social time were likely to be involved in criminal behavior (Osgood et al. 1996; Osgood and Anderson 2004). On the other hand, economists Jacob and Lefgren (2003) have suggested that sports-based after-school programs can serve to exacerbate delinquency through negative peer effects.

³ On the YDS, the high school crime indicators are measured as dichotomous indicators. Thus, the general deviance in high school is a variety scale.

⁴ Age is not controlled because all respondents were in the same grade when the survey started and are, therefore, approximately the same age.

⁵ Some data have measures of both sport and crime, for instance the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, yet the data do not extend as far into the life course as the YDS. Other data, for instance High School and Beyond, extends further into the life course, but does not have developed measures of crime (for more information on these data, see Fejgin (1994) and Kreager (2006).

⁶ Available upon request.