Psychosocial Aspects of Participation in Competitive Sports Among Older Athletes: A Scoping Review

Abstract

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.

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