Abstract:

Many professionals in the field of physical education have always argued that Physical Activity (PA) performed in groups and especially team sports grant young people social contexts for the informal learning of skills and competences that aid social and personal development promoting wellbeing. However, research in PA has seldom compared different types of PA in terms of the social characteristics of participation; this is, either practicing in teams (requiring each other to perform the activity), or in groups (sharing the same space and time but not requiring interactivity), or individually. As a matter of fact, individual practice precludes the informal learning of social competence (favoured especially by team sports) and thus PA’s contribution to social development.

Based on the idea, brought forth by Self-Determination Theory (SDT, Deci & Ryan, 1985, 2000; Ryan & Deci, 2000, 2017), that activities may satisfy or thwart the basic psychological needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness, we asked if different PA practices (i.e. team based, group based, and individual) would be associated with differential amounts of Psychological Need Satisfaction (PNS), flow experience (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988, 1991) and life satisfaction (Diener et al., 1985).

Participants of the present study were 1040 students, 482 men and 558 women, between the ages of 18 and 28 years (M = 24.17, SD = 2.70). We used an ad hoc questionnaire to assess the characteristics of PA participation (with others, in teams, individual, days per week, minutes per day and per week), and the Spanish versions of the following scales for the measurement of psychosocial study variables: the Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction Scale (Vlachopoulos & Michailidou, 2006), the Short Flow Scale (Jackson & Marsh, 1996, Jackson et al., 2008), and the Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener et al., 1985).

Results show that PA practitioners who practiced activities in groups (such as activities with music, even if these were not interactive) scored higher than practitioners of individual PA in life satisfaction and relatedness need satisfaction, however scoring lower on autonomy need satisfaction in their PA; they also practiced fewer days per week but more minutes per session and weekly minutes overall. Similarly, PA practitioners who practiced team sports scored higher on life satisfaction as compared to those who practiced individual activities.

The above findings suggest that the informal learning leading to the development of social competence is facilitated by group based PA and team sports participation such as to positively influence life satisfaction. The importance of these kind of PA is supported by the evidence of the present study, regarding levels of life satisfaction found amount group based and team sport based PA. Promotion of PA via physical education should continue to find ways of informing practitioners of the benefits of group and team practice for wellbeing via the informal learning of social competence.

Keywords:

Informal learning, physical activity, team sports, group practices, life satisfaction.