Soziale Integration durch Sport?

In this study the relationship between physical activity and different dimensions of social integration (number of friends, frequency of contact to friends, number of social contexts the individual is taking part in) is analysed using the data of the Partnermarktsurvey 2009. The concept of opportunities for interaction in foci of activity (here physical activity) is used as the theoretical framework. It can be shown that physical activity has an effect on the social integration of individuals: People who engage in physical activity have more friends, meet them more often and are integrated in more social contexts than people who are not physically active. Differences in social integration even exist among physically active people depending on the kind of sport activity and its form of organisation. Further the setting of the sport activity seems to be of importance. Finally it is recommended that longitudinal data used to investigate the exact causal effect of physical activity on social integration.     

Just for Sport!? Sport,Gambling and Politics in Israel

By adopting a developmental approach, this essay describes and analyses the key processes that led to the establishment and institutionalization of sports gambling in Israel. The socio-historic examination of these processes (1951–1971) suggests that sports gambling in Israel was primarily designed to satisfy a convergence of political interests among governmental decision-makers, leaders of sports institutions and powerful private entrepreneurs.     

How Should We Measure Psychological Resilience in Sport Performers?

Psychological resilience is important in sport because athletes must constantly withstand a wide range of pressures to attain and sustain high performance. To advance psychologists’ understanding of this area, there exists an urgent need to develop a sport-specific measure of resilience. The purpose of this article is to review psychometric issues in resilience research and to discuss the implications for sport psychology. Drawing on the wider general psychology literature to inform the discussion, the narrative is divided into three main sections relating to resilience and its assessment: adversity, positive adaptation, and protective factors. The first section reviews the different ways that adversity has been measured and considers the potential problems of using items with varying degrees of controllability and risk. The second section discusses the different approaches to assessing positive adaptation and examines the issue of circularity pervasive in resilience research. The final section explores the various issues related to the assessment of protective factors drawing directly from current measures of resilience in other psychology sub-disciplines. The commentary concludes with key recommendations for sport psychology researchers seeking to develop a measure of psychological resilience in athletes.     

How Much Sport is there in Sport Physiology? Practice and Ideas in the Stockholm School of Physiology at GCI, 1941–1969

The physiology research at the Royal Central Institute of Gymnastics (Swedish acronym: GCI) in Stockholm was never primarily focused on sports, but has made significant contributions to sport and exercise physiology. Changing ideas about the human body (from form to motor) during the early twentieth century led to criticism towards the posture-oriented Ling gymnastics. The rationalisation movement of the 1930s and onwards also paved the way for a rationalistic physiology research. GCI recruited Eric Hohwü Christensen (1904–1996) from Copenhagen for the new position as professor in physiology in 1941. Christensen built his research programme on the ideas of the Copenhagen School, focusing on basic research, bodily limits and rationalisation of exercise. The majority of research at GCI focused on basic physiology, and the main goal was to rationalise the exercise of the entire population, which was in line with the ambitions of the emerging Swedish welfare state. But applications in elite sports became a claim to fame for GCI through names such as Per-Olof Åstrand and Bengt Saltin. This article aims at showing how the research programme was outlined during Christensen's professorship, 1941–1969. How does a scientific environment focused on basic, physiological research become famous for its impact in sports?     

Sport physiology research and governing gender in sport—a power–knowledge relation?

This article sets out to show how physiological knowledge about sex/gender relates to power issues within sport. The sport physiology research at the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences (Swedish acronym: GIH) during the twentieth century is analysed in relation to the political rationality concerning gender at GIH and within the Swedish Sports Confederation during the same period. The analysis is constituted by Michel Foucault's notion of power–knowledge relations and regimes oftruth. The construction of sex/gender in the physiological research changes over time. Comparative studies on the function of ‘sexual difference’ during strenuous work, which, in hindsight, might be seen to restrict women's sport participation, was gradually displaced by a lack of interest in sexual difference, and later by a growing fascination with sexual difference from a ‘gender perspective’ in terms of women being ‘different but equal’ to men. This displacement goes hand in hand with a displacement of the political rationality concerning gender at GIH and within the Swedish Sports Confederation, where a pre-World War II strategy of excluding women's competitive sport participation, restricting women's physical exercise to gymnastics, was after 1945 followed by a strategy of including women. This was at first in the name of ‘women's right to do sport’—where the physiological research advocated this endeavour—and later in the name of ‘women's right to do sport on their own terms’. However, the research was still being conducted based on the male physiology as the norm.     

Sport for All? Insight into stratification and compensation mechanisms of sporting activity in the 27 European Union member states

Physical activity is an important public health issue and the benefits of an active lifestyle in relation to well-being and health have been strongly emphasised in recent years in Europe, as well as in most parts of the world. However, previous research has shown that physical activity within Europe and its member states is stratified. The present article gains insight into: (1) the geographical stratification; and (2) the social stratification of physical activity in the 27 European Union member states in 2005. Special attention is given to sporting activity in comparison to other forms of physical activity (transport, occupation and household). By doing this we intend to develop a picture of physical activity, in particular sporting activity, within the European Union. In addition, we want to verify whether low sporting activity levels are counterbalanced by other pieces of the total ‘menu of physical activities’. Based on Eurobarometer data from 2005 (N=26,688), bivariate analyses show that 4 out of 10 Europeans are not exposed to sporting activity. Moreover, particular subgroups of non-sportive citizens could be distinguished: South and East Europeans, and women, the elderly, individuals with a lower educational level and rural citizens. Our hypothesis that these groups would compensate for their non-sporting activity by being physically active in other domains could only be confirmed for women and rural citizens, in particular with regard to household physical activity. To understand the underlying structure of these possible compensation mechanisms, additional quantitative and qualitative research is needed. Nevertheless, because of societal trends towards an inactive society, the role of sporting activity will be increasingly important in the future for all inactive subgroups. For this purpose, not only should necessary resources and key stakeholders be identified, but also more importantly the social and environmental barriers for sporting activity need to be addressed.     

Lacrosse History,a History of One Sport or Two? A Comparative Analysis of Men's Lacrosse and Women's Lacrosse in the United States

Men's lacrosse and women's lacrosse share a name, but their histories differ. Both sports developed and became organised in close concert with the race, class and gender expectations of the eras. As a result, the sports began with rules that reflected those norms. Over time, the sports developed separately and generated unique forms, even as they sustained moments of interaction. Therefore, men's lacrosse and women's lacrosse are different sports. Using comparisons as the mode through which to view the sports, this article explores the organised beginnings of men's lacrosse and women's lacrosse to establish that the sports began and continued within identity-based norms. Through the discussion of the practical distinctions and critical understandings of the differences between the games, the author poses that these dissimilarities are relevant in considerations of the separate sports as they continue to change in the larger US sporting context. As sports such as basketball demonstrate, these arguments matter because broad-scale comparisons of women's sports to men's frequently render women's sport participants, and the sports they play, inferior. Notably, women's lacrosse participants also employed comparisons to distinguish and claim their history as unique from that of men's lacrosse. A comparative analysis highlights points of disjuncture between the sports and contextualises the importance of gender in the articulations of difference.     

Black Males in the Stadium: All ‘Bad Niggers’? French Literature,Sport and Masculinity from the 1920s to the 1950s

In the first part of the twentieth century, ‘sports literature’ presented a new form of heroism departing from the traditional models of masculinity. The novels examined the stadiums, the boxing rings or the velodromes and noticed the existence of coloured sportsmen. Black boxers and athletes were considered as original models of manliness competing with the hegemonic masculinity, hitherto written in ‘white’. This essay intends to explore the French ‘sports novels’ published in the first part of the twentieth century. Relying on the history of masculinities and of gender, and on the methodological reflection of ‘race studies’, it examines the meeting between Black identity and athletic masculinity in literature. Thus this articles aims at showing how, through a series of stylistic, narrative and semiotic processes, the fiction essentialized the difference. Both fascinated and scared, the novels stigmatized Black sportsmen and endeavoured to analyse the alterity.