Original scientific paper

Interests of children and youth in the context of prevalence of physical activities and sport

Ana Žnidarec Čučković ; Faculty of Kinesiology, University of Zagreb, Croatia
Katarina Ohnjec ; Faculty of Kinesiology, University of Zagreb, Croatia

Abstract

The results of qualitative research aimed at finding personal views of children and youth are presented in this paper. The research was conducted in consideration of children’s surroundings: school, family and local community. The main objectives of the research were to establish main opinions from the children and youth perspective about their generation problems, possibilities, solutions and ideas for these problems and situations. The interests of children were researched (ways of choosing activities of interest and the conditions that influences the selection were identified). The special objective of this research was to gain whether and to what extent the movement and the different aspects of physical activity are included in their
overall structure of interest. The target group for this study were children and young people aged 10 to 18 years. According to the spatial location, respondents came from schools of four counties in Croatia. The main research method was focus groups. Eight focus groups were organised with a total number of 83 students, with
an individual group comprised of 9 to 12 students. Then result analysis was performed, which included the collection of impressions, careful analysis of sets of transcripts and encoding of each group. Audio recordings were transcribed, and the resulting transcripts were the basis for the qualitative result analysis. Frequency of appearance as well as the percentage of representation of certain codes in the total of transcripts indicated that “interests” were predominantly represented (396, 14.27%). “The problem” as the code in the researched population of students was presented as follows in the series of representationa (302; 10.88%), and followed by “solution” (259; 9.33%) and “ideas” (252; 9.08%). The registered dominant interests of primary school students, observed through the aspect of kinetic activities, showed that the movement gets its own dimension
separate from the context of games and entertainment. Also, it was observed exclusively in relations with various organized sporting activities. In the context of the practice of movement and physical activity for secondary school students, the results indicated that the movement and physical activity played a key role in their interests, but practically were not implemented in everyday life.

Keywords

children and youth perspective; interests; focus groups; prevalence of physical activities and sport

Hrčak ID:

127851

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/127851

Publication date:

30.9.2014.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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