An empirical study of Bourdieu’s theory on capital and habitus in the sporting habits of higher education students learning in Central and Eastern Europe

ABSTRACT

Social exclusion – in sports as well as in all other areas of life – is linked to low socioeconomic status, poverty, unemployment, and low educational attainment. This means that disadvantaged social groups are permanently trapped in a lifestyle lacking physical exercise. In a broader sense, social exclusion from sports activities affects a much wider social spectrum, including groups that suffer disadvantages based on gender, age, place of residence, or disability [Spaaij, R., Farquharson, K., & Marjoribanks, T. (2015). Sport and social inequalities. Sociology Compass, 9(5), 400–411. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12254]. In Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe, a smaller fraction of society has the opportunity to be active regularly, while the majority are left out. Based on Bourdieu's theory on capital and habitus our paper aims to find out what demographic and socialisation factors, as well as how the socio-economic status and the student habitus play roles in student sport activity in five Central and Eastern European countries. Our analysis is based on the database of the questionnaire survey carried out among students in the examined region (PERSIST 2019, N = 2005). Our results show that although students with a higher social status pursue sport more regularly and are more likely to pursue a sport in clubs, gender, habitus, the parental sporting environment, and sporting friends are the main factors that play a positive role in their regular participation.

KEYWORDS:

• SES
• habitus
• socialisation
• sport participation
• higher education students
• Central and Eastern Europe

Disclosure statement

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

Institutional review board statement

This research was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The ethical committee of the University of Debrecen approved this study. The research was conducted ethically, the results are reported honestly, the submitted work is original and not (self-)plagiarised, and authorship reflects the individuals’ contributions.

Notes

1 The students participating in our survey come from the Hungarian teaching language higher education institutions in five countries in CEE (Pusztai & Márkus, 2019). It is to be noted, however, that our results and findings only apply to the institutions of these territories, and they are not representative of the entire country.

2 The not known response option is not considered in the analysis because the very low number of items in this category can have a significant biasing effect.

3 Due to the large number of explanatory variables, only data showing significant differences and correlations are reported in the tables of the bivariate analyses to facilitate interpretation of the results.

Additional information

Funding

Our research was conducted within the framework of Project No.123847 ‘The role of social and organisational factors in student attrition’, funded by the research project programme K-17 of the National Research, Development and Innovation Office Innovation and Development Office. The research on which this paper is based has been implemented by the MTA-KFK 2021-2025/MTA-DE-Parent-Teacher Cooperation Research Group and with the support provided by the Research Programme for Public Education Development of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.