The number of older athletes is growing with the aging of populations across the developed world. This article reviews studies from a variety of disciplines that focus specifically on the motives and experiences of older adults competing in physically demanding sports at events such as masters and veterans competitions in Australia or the Senior Olympics in North America. It is shown that the majority of research into this phenomenon has taken a quantitative approach or failed to consider older athletes’ experiences in the context of broader sociocultural discourses. Therefore, using the author’s research into the experiences of older Australian masters athletes as a catalyst, the need for and strength of sociological qualitative research in this area is discussed. The use of qualitative methods, such as in-depth interviews and observations, and interpretive analysis provided alternative ways of making sense of older adults and their relationship with competitive sport to what is typically found in the sport and aging literature.
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Jay Coakley
afternoon science labs would interfere with practices. As chance would have it, I enjoyed introductory sociology and social psychology courses during my first year and decided to choose sociology as my major with a minor in psychology. I stayed at Regis despite Coach Hall’s departure after my sophomore year
Joshua I. Newman
NASSS academic community in the last two decades, I thought it might be a useful exercise to take this critique seriously and envisage where such a relational, stubbornly realist orientation might take the sociology of sport. Before delving deeper, I should note that Latour is not alone in his
Sociology of Sport Journal
characteristics, sex testing, and gender segregation. Sociology of Sport Journal. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1123/ssj.2022-0121 The weighted descriptive results for U.S. adults’ support for transgender athletes’ rights were incorrectly reported. The unweighted results were accidently
Maureen M. Smith
As women age, society assigns stereotypes that suggest that older women are no longer capable of being competent athletes. In considering the experiences of older women in sport from a sociological perspective, this article provides a short summary of works examining older women in masters sport settings, as well as three brief case studies of older women engaged in sport and movement. As American women age, more of them will have experienced organized high school sport (after the passage of Title IX), suggesting that the experiences of older women in sport will take on new dimensions and meanings worthy of exploration.
Jay Coakley
This article tells a story about the sociology of sport as it matured and changed from 1981 to 2020. 1 The origin and first 15 years of the field (1965–1980) were described by Greendorfer ( 1981 ), a noted scholar in physical education at the University of Illinois and one of the founders of the
Dominic Malcolm
, and the opportunities available to, sociology (of sport) as an academic (sub-)discipline. SRC is indicative of both the expanding imperative of health ( Lupton, 1995 ) and the increasing prominence of medicine and health within sports science ( Malcolm, 2014 ). It resonates with the “crisis” which has
K. Andrew R. Richards, Colin G. Pennington, and Oleg A. Sinelnikov
. doi:10.1123/jtpe.10.3.286 10.1123/jtpe.10.3.286 Billingham , M. ( 2007 ). Sociological perspectives . In B. Stretch & M. Whitehouse (Eds.), Health and social care (pp. 301 – 334 ). Oxford, UK : Heinemann . * Blankenship , B.T. , & Coleman , M.M. ( 2009 ). An examination of “wash
George H. Sage
This paper examines the linkages between physical education, sociology, and sociology of sport in North America. Physical education and sociology in North America have had numerous mutual ties since the beginnings of both fields. In the first section of the paper, I describe the rise of sociology and physical education in North America, emphasizing the linkages that initially existed between physical education and sociology, and then the separation that transpired between the disciplines. The second section examines the connections between social theory and physical education before the sociology of sport was formally developed. The final section details the rise of sociology of sport, with the main focus on the role of physical educators (a.k.a. sociocultural kinesiologists, sport studies scholars, human kinetics scholars) in the development of sociology of sport. This section concludes with a discussion of the linkages of social theory, critical pedagogy in physical education, and sport sociology in physical education.
Letícia Cristina Lima Moraes and Wanderley Marchi Júnior
According to Malcolm ( 2012 ), sociology of sport is a subdiscipline of sociology approaching maturity. Its consistency, productivity in specific journals, and representation through its own scientific associations are indications of how this has been possible ( Dart, 2014 ; Malcolm, 2012
