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1 Introduction
This second edition, like the first, is intended for both academic and professional audiences. It is not a ācookbookā, nor even a guide to good practice, though it does include some of the latter. The first part of the chapter summarises very briefly constraints on playing sport and the benefits when one does, both summarising a small mountain of material.
Constraints on playing sport
Goodale and Witt (1989) and Jackson (1988) reviewed current research into barriers faced and constraints experienced by would-be recreationalists, and the latter (Jackson, 1991) criticised it for the following: for being limited to barriers to using public resources, for concentrating on groups subjectively identified as constrained, and for using ārudimentaryā item-by-item analysis. Subsequently, Jackson identified moves from recreation to leisure, to a wider range of activities and groups, and to other points of constraint, in lapsing, preferences and satisfactions. He also distinguished (Jackson, 1990a, b) between antecedent or structural constraints (influencing preference formation, divided into intrapersonal and interpersonal) and intervening or direct ones (affecting which preferences turn into participation). Kay and Jackson (1991) reported high levels of constraint on lower social groups in their Stoke-on-Trent sample, but also constraints on affluent groups who wished to participate in more activities or more frequently, virtually everyone being constrained relative to their dream/ideal lifestyle.
Having reviewed over fifty studies affecting particular groups, Collins, Henry and Houlihan (1999) produced Table 1.1, later with detailed weighting modified by new work, but its utility has been proven several times. It distinguishes three groups of constraints. The first, comprising rows 1ā4, is labelled structural/environmental factors ā the nexus of economic, physical and social factors that lead to identifying āproblem estatesā and neighbourhoods in cities so graphically described in Bringing Britain Together, but which present in a more dispersed and concealed form in rural areas (Chapter 10). At the other end of the scale in the lower six rows is the personal/internal psychological group ā seeing some activities as ānot for meā because of feeling powerless and unfit, āunsportyā, or lacking the money, skills or educational and social capital to take part. As Harland et al. (nd) showed, these are just as effective as poverty, lack of transport, and managers who are blind to or prejudiced about some particular clients. Between these two groups lie the mediating factors of āgatekeepersā like facility managers, coaches, sports development officers, teachers, or club officers who select who is āinā and who is āoutā of groups, and of societyās representatives who label people as ādifferentā (an issue explored in both Chapter 7 on ethnic groups and Chapter 9 on disabled people). This arrangement has some echoes of structure and agency issues in sociology. The columns of the Table 1.1 cover the main groups in society that may be considered excluded, and about whom the evidence is displayed in Chapters 3 to 9.
The number of +++ indicates the estimated strength/salience of a particular factor for a particular group. Presenting this material in this manner brings out:
ā¢ The large numbers of people affected by one or more factors (looking across the rows). Thus improving the design of buses and buildings for access for wheelchair users also benefits others with mobility problems, like older people using walking sticks, and mothers with pushchairs, toddlers and lots of shopping bags.
ā¢ Many groups are multiply constrained (looking down the columns). So implementing an inherently good single policy to attack a particular constraint, like leisure/loyalty cards with discounts to combat poverty (Chapter 3) or of adapting access for physical disability, have no effect on exclusion if managers do not proactively market and make their facilities or services known to particular groups, or if the target population feel insecure in going to certain venues (females, ethnic minorities, aged and disabled citizens at night and in secluded places). Releasing one constraint merely gives another prominence. Here is the permanent ground and justification for better partnerships and ājoined-upā thinking, and client-centred policies.
Poverty adds an extra intensity to each of the other factors in terms of ālocking people inā and accentuating their feeling that they are not autonomous agents, capable of bringing change to their lives (Chapter 3). Even for the community as a whole, money is listed as the most significant constraint; the second, time, is quoted by rich and poor alike, even by retired people; the chronic unemployed is the group with the greatest problems of time structuring (Kay and Jackson, 1990, 1991). As we see in much of the rest of this book, there are combinations of exclusions that can be said to lead to double deprivation ā e.g., being elderly or from an ethnic minority and in lower social groups.
As evidenced in Chapter 4 and elsewhere, if exclusion is prolonged in youth, it tends to affect the rest of the life trajectory, and only a few determined people break through, often for short periods, while some can also slide down ...
