Organized sports for all: A Study on Experiences and Perspectives of Immigrant Parents on Organized Sports

Background and Purpose of the Project

Research often highlights that structured activities can offer youth opportunities to observe, learn, and practice socially acceptable behaviors (e.g., Agans et al., 2016). This is also one of the key reasons why many parents want their children to engage in and spend their leisure time in various organized activities, such as sports (Munoz et al., 2021). An important explanation for why parents invest significant resources (time and money) in their children's sports involvement, including activities like selling raffle tickets, providing transportation to practices and matches, and/or taking on roles as coaches, is to ensure the child's continued participation and engagement in community sports (Dorsch et al., 2021). Thus, parents play a crucial role in children's involvement in organized sports, leading to extensive research being conducted on parental involvement and sports (Knight, 2019).

However, the current literature, both nationally and internationally, primarily focuses on domestically-born parents, with limited attention to immigrant families, such as first-generation immigrants (Dorsch et al., 2021). This is a significant concern given that first-generation immigrants in Sweden constitute approximately 20% of the total population (SCB, 2022). This knowledge gap consequently restricts researchers’ and practitioners’ ability to promote participation in organized sports among immigrant families, a group consistently shown to have lower levels of sports engagement compared to domestically-born families (Jaf et al., 2020, 2021; 2023). This, in turn, limits the potential to access the positive outcomes associated with organized sports activities.

To address this knowledge gap, the current project aims to better understand the perceptions of organized sports among immigrant families/caregivers in Sweden and identify potential barriers and facilitators that may impact their involvement in their children's organized sports activities.