Bouncing back or staying inactive? The social inequality in sport participation before, during and after the COVID-pandemic

ABSTRACT

This contribution addresses the development of educational and financial inequality in sport participation in the Netherlands over the course of the COVID-pandemic. More specifically, we deal with the issue whether increased educational and financial inequality during the COVID-pandemic is temporary or becomes permanent after relaxation of the COVID-measures. We expected lower educated and people with financial problems to have less resources to bounce back to sport participation or to continue sport participation in sport over the course of the COVID-pandemic. To test our expectations, we performed multinominal logistic regression analyses on longitudinal data from the Dutch LISS-panel (n = 1.157). Our results confirmed that higher educated more often bounced back in their sport participation after COVID. Lower educated and people with financial problems were more likely to completely dropout. Our main conclusion is that educational and financial inequality in sport participation further increased after relaxation of the COVID-measures. This study enhances the understanding of the long-term impact of the COVID-pandemic on inequality in sport participation, and that might lead to more intensified sport promotion policies. Ongoing attention of policymakers for vulnerable groups is required to tackle social inequality in sport participation enlarged by the COVID-pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• sport participation
• COVID
• educational inequality
• financial inequality
• dropout

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by a ZonMw grant number [10430032010016].

Notes on contributors

Remco Hoekman

Remco Hoekman is director at the Mulier Institute and affiliated to the Department of Sociology at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. His research interests include sport participation, sport facilities and sport policy and he has published various books, book chapters, articles and reports on these topics. He is Past-President of the European Association for Sociology of Sport (EASS) and co-editor of the European Journal for Sport and Society (EJSS).

Malou Grubben

Malou Grubben MSc is a junior researcher in the Department of Sociology at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her research interests include social inequality and sport participation.

Gerbert Kraaykamp

Gerbert Kraaykamp is Professor in Empirical Sociology in the Department of Sociology/ICS, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. His research interests include educational inequality, cultural capital and lifestyle differentiation. He has published widely on these subjects in international journals.