Fanatic and Energetic Participation in Sports

Sport participation can be classified into fanatic and energetic. Fanatic is related to attendance at sport events. Energetic sport participation is that a person exercises some sport activity by herself/himself. Using bivariate probit allows us to separate the direct and indirect marginal effects of different explanatory variables. A selection of some socio-economic variables is used here to explain the profile of passive and active sport participation. The data is taken from ISSP 2007 which is a mainly European level survey on these issues. A bivariate probit model explaining sport participation, both fanatic (attending sporting events) and energetic (exercising yourself) sport participation is estimated first. The above mentioned variables - age, the body-mass index, the educational level, gender and marital status and incomes - are used as explanatory variables 34 estimations in each country. Some of the variables are not available for each county, for example the body-mass index is usually not available. The second step is to analyze the marginal effects of gender using Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. The second step analysis reveals that individualism, uncertainty avoidance and indulgence are the dimensions that significantly explain gender differences in sporting behavior.