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Relative age is associated with sport dropout: evidence from youth categories of French basketball
Author(s) -
Delorme N.,
Chalabaev A.,
Raspaud M.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of medicine and science in sports
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.575
H-Index - 115
eISSN - 1600-0838
pISSN - 0905-7188
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0838.2009.01060.x
Subject(s) - basketball , demography , dropout (neural networks) , psychology , young adult , medicine , developmental psychology , geography , archaeology , machine learning , sociology , computer science
The aim of the current research was to investigate the relative age effect (RAE) as a factor of basketball dropout. In order to do so, we examined the distribution of birth dates of young male ( n =44 498) and female ( n =30 147) French basketball players who have dropped out this sport during or at the end of the 2005–2006 season. χ 2 analyses showed an underrepresentation of dropouts among male players born early in the competition year and an overrepresentation among those born late in the “9–10 years old,”“11–12 years old,” and “13–14 years old” categories and in the first year of the “15–17 years old” category. Concerning girls, this asymmetry was observed across the same age categories. For both boys and girls, there was no biased distribution in the “7–8 years old” category. Findings of the present study confirm that the RAE should be taken into consideration in studies about sport dropout as a variable that may influence this phenomenon significantly.