Gender role conflict and psychosocial concerns across race and school type as influences on adolescent girls' sport participation and withdrawal

One of the most popular activities for both boys and girls to participate in are sports, with over 44 million youth involved in youth sports (National Council of Youth Sports, 2008). While girls are participating at higher rates than they were before the passage of Title IX in 1972, there still exists a discrepancy between the number of boys and girls who participate in sports. Further, there is an even larger discrepancy when looking at the demographics of the adolescent girls who are participating at the lowest (girls of color and girls from low-income urban areas) and highest (girls who are white and reside in suburban areas) rates.;One way of studying these discrepancies in sport participation is examining if gender role conflict or psychosocial concerns have a significant impact on adolescent girls' sport participation. With there being a lack of research that studies the sport experiences of girls of various racial and economic backgrounds, this study filled this void by examining not only girls' gender role conflict and psychosocial concerns, but also their overall levels of sport participation and their views on gender appropriateness of sports.;Two hundred and thirty-six girls who attended middle SES suburban ( n = 130) and low SES urban (n = 106) high schools participated in this study. It was found that adolescent girls reported low amounts of gender role conflict and psychosocial concerns. Related, girls also reported that gender role conflict and psychosocial concerns played a small role in any decreased middle school sport participation. Some differences emerged when examining girls' experiences with these two measures across race, with African American girls having significantly more concerns with their image and African American girls from middle SES suburban schools reporting the highest amount of impact of gender role conflict.;There were similar mixed findings when examining current sport participation. Girls who were current athletes in high school actually had higher gender role conflict scores than those girls who were non-current sport participants. There were limited differences between current and non-current sport participants' psychosocial concerns, with non-current sport participants reporting significantly higher image concerns. Similar results were found with girls who had played and quit a feminine sport, as they had higher image concerns than girls who had played a quit a masculine sport. When looking at middle school and high school sport participation, white girls from middle SES suburban schools were typically the girls that participated the most in sport. What played an especially significant role was the type of school a girl attended, with African American girls particularly negatively impacted with their high school sport participation if they attended a low SES urban school.;While more research is needed to confirm these patterns, what these findings suggest is that there is a significant decrease in sport participation between middle school and high school, but only for girls that attend low SES urban schools. Noting the small amount of impact that psychosocial concerns and gender role conflict had with girls in this study, it can be tentatively concluded that there are other reasons that impact adolescent girls' decreasing or quitting their sport participation.