Social integration and volunteering in sport clubs in Europe. Combining knowledge on sports clubs policies, sports clubs and members in ten European countries

Abstract

Sport has the ability to bring together people in activity-based communities that can be beneficial for individuals as well as for society. There is, however, a limited amount of knowledge on the political conditions for and structural characteristics of sports clubs that promote social integration and volunteering. Most of the existing knowledge is, furthermore, country-specific. The Erasmus+ sport project ‘Social Inclusion and Volunteering in Sports Clubs in Europe’ addresses this limitation by collecting comparative knowledge about sports clubs across European borders. Ten countries participate: Belgium (Flanders), Denmark, England, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain and Switzerland. The study has collected data on three levels: The sports policy level (macro), the sports club level (meso) and the member and volunteer level (micro). This approach was inspired by the multilevel model developed by Siegfried Nagel (Nagel et al., 2015). The data at the macro level is based on existing knowledge gathered by experts from each country. At the meso and micro level, comparable survey data was collected. It includes answers from 35,790 sports clubs (meso level) and 13,082 members and volunteers (micro level). The following research question will be thoroughly addressed: What patterns and correlations exist between social integration and volunteering in sports clubs (meso level) on the one hand and sports policies (macro level) and the participation and attitudes of members and volunteers (micro level) on the other? Results will be presented in Prague.