Do sports matter to people? A cross-national multilevel study

Do people consider sports as important? In this article, I investigate how people (N approximate to 44,000) in 33 countries (ISSP 2007) assess three aspects of sports: sports as socialization, integration and internationalization. I study opinions on sports in light of individual and national characteristics, and find that close to 90% of the inhabitants of the nations participating in this study supports the idea that sports matters for socialization, whereas 76% of the respondents think that sports also have a positive integrative effect. People agree less with the idea that sports help for the relations between nations. The multivariate analyses show that high education and high income go together with positive opinions on most aspects of sports. There is an interaction showing that the effect of education depends on the GNP of nations. Women tend to be more skeptical towards the benign effects of sports, whereas older people are more positive.