The Relationships between Participation Motivation and Continuous Participation Intention: Mediating Effect of Sports Commitment among University Futsal Club Participants

Sports activities through university clubs are very important because university students need to have functional and emotional literacy through physical education classes. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to empirically verify the effect of participation motivation of university futsal club participants on sports commitment and continuous participation intention. To this end, 250 male college students who participated in a futsal club living in Seoul were used as a sample group, and a survey was conducted for about two weeks from 3 March to 18 March 2022. Of the 235 respondents, a final 221 were used for data analysis. The statistical processing of the data collected for this study was analyzed using the SPSS 26.0 program and the AMOS 26.0 program. The main results are as follows. First, participation motivation factors such as pleasure, technical development, and outward display significantly positively affected sports commitment. Second, sports commitment of university students significantly positively affected continuous participation intention. Third, among the participation motivation factors, technological development and condition factors directly and positively affected continuous participation intention, but pleasure and outward display factors did not directly affect continuous participation intention. The mediating effect of sports commitment was confirmed in the relationship between pleasure, technical development, and outward display, which are subfactors of participation motivation and continuous participation intention. As it was revealed that participation motivation and commitment to sports are important factors in the intention to continue to participate in sports, a physical education class program to increase such participation motivation and commitment is needed.