2.3 Recreation Trends: Analysis & Methodology

2.3 RECREATION TRENDS:

ANALYSIS & METHODOLOGY

The Sports & Fitness Industry Association’s (SFIA) Sports, Fitness & Recreational Activities Topline Participation Report 2017 was used to evaluate national sport and fi tness participatory trends. The study is based on survey fi ndings carried out in 2016 and the beginning of 2017 by the Physical Activity Council, which conducted a total of 24,134 online interviews, including 11,453 individual and 12,681 household surveys. A sample size of 24,134 completed interviews is considered by SFIA to result in a high degree of statistical accuracy. A sport with a participation rate of fi ve percent has a confi dence interval of plus or minus 0.31 percentage points under 95 percent confi dence interval. Using a weighting technique, the total population fi gure used in this study is 296,251,344 people (ages six and older). The purpose of the report is to establish levels of activity and identify key participatory trends in recreation across the US.

CORE VS. CASUAL PARTICIPATION

In addition to overall participation rates, SFIA further categorizes active participants as either core or casual participants based on frequency. Core participants have higher participatory frequency thresholds than casual participants. The thresholds vary among different categories of activities. For instance, core participants engage in most fi tness and recreational activities more than 50 times per year, while for sports, the threshold for core participation is typically 13 times per year. Core participants are more committed and less likely to switch to other fi tness or sport activities or become inactive (engage in no physical activity) than causal participants. For instance, the most popular activity in 2016, fi tness walking, has twice the core participants than causal participants. This may also explain why activities with more core participants tend to experience less pattern shifts than those with larger groups of casual participants.