The use of public sports facilities by the disabled in England

Abstract

Disabled sports participants are a small proportion of sports participants at English public sports centres; but they are important to the social inclusion agenda. This paper aims to provide a detailed insight into the preferences and behaviour of disabled sports participants. It investigated whether there were statistical differences: first, between the disabled sports participants and the non-disabled sports participants in terms of (1) social demographics, (2) patterns of participation, (3) travel, (4) sports activities and (5) customer satisfaction; and second, between age, ethnic, socio-economic and gender groups of their subsamples, on (2), (4) and (5) again. Disability is defined as having any long term illness or health problem which limits a person's daily activities or the work that a person can do. The data collected through the National Benchmarking Service, for 458 sports centres from 2005 to 2011, revealed that about 9% of over 150,000 sports participants were disabled. Swimming, using fitness equipment and keep fit related exercises were the top three most frequently stated main sports activities by the disabled. It was also more likely for the disabled to participate in organised activities, own a leisure card and participate regularly when compared with the non-disabled participants. In addition, the disabled were also more likely than the non-disabled to travel to the centre by public transport, from home and travel a longer journey time. The industry weaknesses as identified by the disabled relate to physical evidence of the sports centres, particularly cleanliness attributes. Measures that can be taken to increase sports participation by the disabled include competent support at sports centres, promotions through discount schemes or leisure cards, and free transportation to sport centres in catchment areas with high proportions of disabled in their population.

The performance of local authority sports facilities in England during a period of recession and austerity

“…In the UK there are two benchmarking services relevant to sport -APSE Performance Networks and Sport England's National Benchmarking Service (NBS). The data derived from the NBS has been used widely as the basis for examining a range of performance management issues around public sector sports facility provision including their operational efficiency (Liu et al, 2007), usage by disadvantaged groups (Liu et al, 2009a;Taylor et al, 2011;Kung and Taylor, 2014) as well as the relationship between sport facility performance and different management types and quality awards (Ramchandani and Taylor, 2011). NBS data has also been used to measure customer service quality (Liu et al, 2008), identify customer segments (Liu et al, 2009b) and profile customer satisfaction in the context of English public sport facilities.…”

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“…Based on the current study, results showed that the three dimensions of service quality significantly predict disabled athletes' satisfaction of sports clubs, as was the case with the work of Kung, and Taylor (2014), they analyses satisfaction by the disabled of the services of various public sports facilities in England. The two of three dimensions variables were significant (interaction, outcome).…”

On the Planning and Design of the Utilization Efficiency of College Gymnasiums in Jiangsu

“…Figure 6 is the types of sports events for college teachers to participate in leisure time. As can be seen from it, basketball (63.64%, Pascual et al, 2009), volleyball (54.55%, Kung andTaylor, 2014) and badminton (54.55%, Kung and Taylor, 2014) are the frequent sports events. Roller skating and martial arts are rarely popular, basically in that there lacks venues and instructors.…”