Age Knows No Bounds: A Latent Content Analysis of Social Media Comments Toward Older Adults’ Engagement in Sports Activities

Abstract

With the growing statistics of older adults across societies, sustaining their health and well-being through active participation in sports cannot be neglected nor overlooked. This qualitative study purports to characterize the ontology of social media comments relative to older person’s engagement in sports via latent content analysis. Specifically, a set of YouTube comments ( n = 7,546), extracted from select videos featuring older adults in sports ( n = 62), through YouTube Data Application Programming Interface (API) Version 3, was subjected to inductive analytic procedures of content analysis. Interestingly, this study afforded the emergence of a playing field model emanating from the dualistic perspectives of aging as engagement and aged as engaged that represent how YouTube users view older adult’s continual involvement in sports. Limitations and future directions of this study are also discussed in this article.

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“…In pursuit of this objective, it adopts content analysis techniques. Content analysis has found extensive successful application within the realm of sport communication studies (Sch€ afer and V€ ogele, 2021), including studies considering the utilization of social media within sports in general (de Guzman et al, 2021;Hambrick and Kang, 2015;Wang and Zhou, 2015), and football (Anagnostopoulos et al, 2018;Doyle et al, 2022;Maderer et al, 2018;Winand et al, 2019). This technique facilitates the meticulous classification, coding, and identification of recurring themes or patterns inherent within textual data (Hsieh and Shannon, 2005).…”

“…In pursuit of this objective, it adopts content analysis techniques. Content analysis has found extensive successful application within the realm of sport communication studies (Schäfer and Vögele, 2021), including studies considering the utilization of social media within sports in general (de Guzman et al. , 2021; Hambrick and Kang, 2015; Wang and Zhou, 2015), and football (Anagnostopoulos et al.…”