Background and Objectives In the last decade, sport has been considered a tool in active aging to maintain physical fitness, improve mental wellbeing and form social relationships among older people. However, a thorough psychosocial understanding of the phenomenon of older athletes competing in sports events is lacking. Most research has focused on competitive sports participation in the young population. This study analyzes the general state of knowledge of competitive sports participation among athletes aged 50 years and older from a psychosocial perspective. Research Design and Methods We followed the five-step process outlined by Arksey and O’Malley (2005) and expanded by Levac and colleagues (2010). After the search in four electronic databases, 69 peer-reviewed articles met the inclusion criteria. Results The findings indicate that psychosocial research into older people’s participation in competitive sports has grown moderately in the last decade. While intrapersonal and interpersonal aspects have dominated the academic psychosocial discourse on older athletes’ competitive sports participation, aspects related to the environment/community and policy have largely been overlooked. Discussion and Implications We identified several critical gaps in the literature, classified into conceptual (e.g., lesser attention to personality, emotional and cognitive aspects), methodological (e.g., longitudinal studies almost absent), and diverse aspects (e.g., focus on a wide indiscriminate age range; few comparisons between types of sports; underrepresentation of some nation or world regions as well as few cross-national comparative studies). These research gaps hint at opportunities that future research on older people’s participation in competitive sports should address.
Active aging is a concept used to describe and promote lifestyles that contribute to a healthy aging process. However, these lifestyles vary widely, and the concept of active aging encompasses many activities. This paper considers two axes to classify the range of activities that can contribute to active aging: the resources needed to carry out such activities (low and high-resource needs) and the main orientation of the activities (self-oriented vs. activity with others). To illustrate this classification, three types of participation were analyzed, including in leisure activities, high-demand sports, and political organizations. The presented discussion compares these three activities, reveals challenges for future research using this new classification, highlights the practical implications of diversity when promoting forms of active aging.
Using a socioecological model as a theoretical framework, we aimed to explore the barriers to retain in competitive sport 463 senior athletes (aged 61.4 ± 5.5 years) actively engaged in sports disciplines from 4 European countries. Participants answered an open-ended question regarding perceived barriers to continued engagement in sports, and their answers were subject to content analysis. The results highlighted physical determinants as the main reasons for potential disengagement from competitive sports. Our data suggest the need to minimize these potential barriers by implementing programs that are designed to keep senior athletes competing in sports for as long as possible.
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