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Sport and Sexuality: Athletic Participation by Sexual Minority and Sexual Majority Adolescents in the U.S.

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Abstract

There are contradictory expectations regarding the relationship between sport and sexuality, one suggesting less sports participation for sexual minority males and more for sexual minority females, with the other hypothesizes no participation differences by sexuality for either males or females. I used the nationally representative Add Health Survey of middle and high school students in the U.S. to assess the degree to which sexual minority and sexual majority boys and girls play sports and the differences in the types of sports that they play. Findings from logistic regression analyses indicated there were very few differences in the degree and type of sports participation by sexuality, but somewhat larger differences as the adolescents move from middle to high school.

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Acknowledgement

This research uses data from Add Health, a program project designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris, and funded by a grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 17 other agencies. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Persons interested in obtaining data files from Add Health should contact Add Health, Carolina Population Center, 123 W. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27516-2524 (addhealth@unc.edu). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis. Thanks to Mary Laske for her help with the data analysis and to Jan Yoder, Michael Kimmel, Mike Messner, Eric Anderson, Jessica Headley and Sandra Spickard Prettyman for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Akron, Akron, OH, 44325-1905, USA

    John F. Zipp

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Zipp, J.F. Sport and Sexuality: Athletic Participation by Sexual Minority and Sexual Majority Adolescents in the U.S.. Sex Roles 64, 19–31 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-010-9865-4

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