A Study of Women’s Attitude towards Sport Participation and its Effective Socio-Psychological Factors

Introduction Today, sport is considered as a basic need in all over the world. Participation in sport activities professionally, until recently was a male activity and women had no significant contribution in sport activities. After World War II, however, women's disposition to sport activities changed, because of factors such as improvements in leisure time, living standards, attention to health and fitness, mass media effects, paying more attention to sport achievements, and change in traditional gender roles. However, despite the importance and necessity of sport participation for women, women's participation in sport activities is still limited as a global rule. For example, sport participation rates for women is 56% in Britain and 59.9% in Australia. In the US, more than 55.2% of the population of women are overweight on the basis of body mass index. In addition, 37.9% of the American women don’t have any physical activity during the week. Sport participation of women is not also satisfactory in Iran and the results of some national surveys show that, about 41.2% of Iranian women do get more or less involved in sport activities but others do not. Many reasons have been proposed to explain women unwillingness to participate in sport activities. They can be classified into three main categories including practical, personal and socio-cultural barriers, and also many studies have been conducted to investigate influential factors on women’s sport participation. In the categories of personal and socio-cultural barriers, rarely have been studied the factors that influence women’s attitude towards participation in sport activities. So, the main goal of the present research is to investigate the relationship between social trust, self-esteem and instrumental personality and women’s attitude towards sport participation in Iran. Materials and Methods The research is a survey study. Research population include all women aged 15-30 in Jahrom in Fars province. Sample size is 336 individuals who were selected by means of random multi-stage sampling method. The measurement tool is a set of four researcher-made questionnaires including attitude towards sport participation (2 dimensions and 12 items), social trust (2 dimensions and 10 items), self-esteem (2 dimensions and 10 items) and instrumental personality based on Talcott Parsons’s theory (3 dimensions and 15 items). The Validity of the scales was measured using factor analysis technique. Based on the results, KM