The Level of Formal Education Qualifications and Gender Predicting Participant Motivation in International Sport

Levels of education have been shown to influence human life outcomes. Higher levels of educational attainment are associated with better self-assessed health, physical functioning, lower levels of morbidity and mortality and longer lifespans compared to their less-educated peers. However, minimal published evidence has evaluated to relationship between level of formal education and participant motivation in international sport. A participant motivation model evaluates factors, which enhance or impede motivation to participate in competitive sport. The study aim was to evaluate the differences between level of formal education and participant motivation in international sport in male and female athletes at the international multisport event the World Masters Games (WMG) 2009. The sample consisted of master’s male and female volunteer participants. Data was collected by an online self-report survey using the Limesurveytm interactive survey system linked to the games. Participant motivation was assessed by Motivations of Marathoners Scale (MOMS) instrument. The MOMS is a self-report sport psychological instrument that measures factors that motivate athletes to participate in sport. Education level was identified by the highest level of formal education achieved based on the following categories of primary, high school, diploma-trade-technical, undergraduate university and postgraduate university education. Gender was self-identified in the survey instrument. Research design was a bifactorial ANOVA where gender and level of education were the independent variables and the nine factors from MOMS scale the dependent variable set. Multivariate analyses of discriminant function analysis and neural network MLP was applied to develop an order of importance for the nine factors to classify cases into respective groups for education level and gender. The results indicated the level of education displayed significant differences with all nine participant motivation factors with primary school level qualification displaying lowest scores on most factors. A small number of gender differences were noted for health orientation, competition, affiliation and life meaning, however the direction of responses were similar for both genders. The overall trend indicated that primary level educated athletes displayed significantly lower scores, however the direction of responses displayed indicated a more positive response (lower to higher scores) to the nine factors from primary through to postgraduate education and may imply that education level achieved is positively related to participant motivation in international sport. Multivariate approaches to classify into level of education groups was unsuccessful, however the methods did have some success in classifying males from females based on participant motivation scores for affiliation, competition, self-esteem and recognition. This information is useful when designing marketing schemes to promote participation in master’s international multisport events.