Föräldrars ishockeyhabitus och deras barns deltagande : Vilka ges möjlighet att spela ishockey

Sammanfattning: Rooted and centered within a Bourdieu-inspired understanding of how the habitus and social class of parents affects childrens’ sports choices, this paper contributes to a greater appreciation of how social capital and social background impact a family’s ability to practice the sport of ice-hockey. Historically, there has been a significant amount of research investigating the reasons for- and rates of- dropout from sports participation, but few attempts has been undertaken to study athletes who begin and continue to actively play a certain sport. Through the creation of an index which measures different variables, this paper introduces the concept of an ice-hockey habitus. This habitus was used to compare the education, occupations, economic wealth and other demographic parameters of parents of ice-hockey-playing children. With that in mind, the aim of this paper was to investigate what characterizes ice-hockey playing childrens’ parents. The results were found through looking at the above-mentioned demographics in relation to previous research, and, briefly, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Additionally, a further aim is to document the demographics of the parents of continual-participation among young ice-hockey players. To do so, a quantitative research method was utilized, through which a web-based questionnaire was formed and used as foundation for the gathering of the empirical data. The total amount of responses amounted to n=576, from four disparate cities within a geographical distribution from south to north. The findings showed that there was a correlation between families with ice-hockey playing children and highly educated parents (in some areas more than double the Swedish average) and economic wealth (as more than four out of five families earns equal to- or higher than the Swedish average). The findings also showed that for the ice-hockey habitus, level of education did not affect mothers’ index level. For the fathers’ index, the amount of highly educated fathers decreased as the ice-hockey habitus increased. A further correlation found was that as ice-hockey habitus increased, so did the amount of families with higher economic wealth.