Dropping out of sports in adolescence: The role of gender and amotivation for sports

Abstract

During adolescence sport, as a new social environment, contributes to social, cognitive and
emotional development of young people. As a facilitator of mental health it represents a protective
factor for the development of behavioral and health problems. However, each year about 50% of
adolescents drop out of sport. Such high percentage at this critical developmental period raised the
interest of researchers. One of the theories that represent basic standing point for understanding
the process of dropping out of sports is Self-determination theory which postulates that the key for
understanding human behavior is his motivation. This theory defines six types of motivation, one of
which is low self-regulated motivation - amotivation. Amotivation is defined as a lack of contingency
between actions and outcomes, feeling of incompetence and lack of reasons for playing sports.
Earlier studies have shown that there are significant gender differences in dropping out of sports,
and that girls tend to drop out in higher percentage. Because of the importance of sports for
development in adolescence and the development of self-image, this study examines the role of
amotivation and gender in predicting intention to drop out of sports of young male and female
handball players. The sample consisted of 66 female and 57 male handball players, the average age
of 13.5 years, who train handball on average 50 months. The data was obtained during the February
of 2016, at the regional handball competition in Vojvodina. The participants filled out the Sport
Motivation Scale -2 (Pelletier et al., 2013) which measures: intrinsic, introjected, integrated, identified,
extrinsic motivation and amotivation for sports. Intention to drop out of sports was assessed on one,
five-point scale Lickert scale. Before conducting moderation analysis where intention to drop out of
sports was criteria, first all the assumptions of normality, linearity and multicollinearity were met.
Amotivation and gender represent significant predictive model (F(2,119) = 9.68, p < .001), which
explains 14% of the variance, where only amotivation was singled out as significant predictor (β =
.374, p < .001). Introducing gender as moderator, result of moderation analysis show that this
predictive model explains 22% of variance (F(3,118) = 18.11, p < .001) and that moderating effect of
gender is important factor in explaining the intention to drop out of sports in adolescence (β = - .39,
p < .01). Boys who have higher amotivation to a greater extent intend to drop out of sports, while in
girls intention to drop out of sports doesn’t depend on the degree of amotivation. These results call
for further research of the process of dropping out of sports in adolescence, and to determine
additional risk factors for girls. Theoretical and practical implications will be discussed in this paper.
Keywords: amotivation, handball, adolescence, dropping out of sports