Getting a Grip on the Private Sport Sector in Europe

Contemporary sport is organized and developed around public, voluntary and private sectors. Especially public and voluntary sport sectors have been approached in recent publications in Europe, where sport has traditionally been formed around state involvement and non-profit sport clubs. Private sport sector has received less attention in research because the field is multidimensional, fragment and difficult to define. Private sport sector comprises all profit making, commercial companies and other organisations and events that produce and sell sport goods and services with the aim of making monetary profit. The demand for sport-related products and services has been growing for many years. …

Sociodemographic Correlates of Parental Co-Participation in Digital Media Use and Physical Play of Preschool-Age Children

Young children’s digital media use and physical activity have gained attention in recent research. Parental co-participation has a major impact on children’s health consequences. This study addressed a gap in the research by investigating daily parental co-participation in children’s digital media use and physical play, using the family ecological model theoretical framework. The participants in this nationally representative cross-sectional study were 2512 Finnish parents with two- to six-year-old children. Parents completed a questionnaire. Sociodemographic correlates of co-participation and of the awareness of guidelines regarding co-participation and correlation between co-participation…

Sport Clubs in Finland

This chapter introduces the current state of the Finnish sport clubs. The article aims to highlight firstly, how sport and physical culture in Finland are historically based on the civil society and volunteer activities; secondly what are the characteristics of sport clubs in Finland; and finally what kind of challenges sport clubs are facing at the moment and in the future.

Kuntosalitreeni : maailmanmitan trendi

Kuntosaliharjoittelusta on 50 vuodessa kehittynyt yksi nopeimmin kasvavista fyysisen aktiivisuuden muodoista. Siitä on tullut maailmanlaajuisesti liki 200 miljoonan ihmisen harrastus. Kysynnän kasvaessa erilaisten kuntoilupalveluiden tarjonta on etenkin 2000-luvulla lisääntynyt räjähdysmäisesti. Samalla osa kuntosaleista on muuttunut liikunnan ohella terveys- ja hyvinvointipalvelujen tuottajaksi. nonPeerReviewed

Appendix: NACE Rev. 2 Directly Sport-Related Classes

Fitness: The New Black or Even a Religion?

This book has outlined the significance of the fitness industry in fifteen European countries, including Flanders in Belgium and England in the United Kingdom. All of these countries and regions follow nowadays the basic principles of the liberal market economy, where the legal and political restrictions for the sport business industry to emerge, develop and grow are minimal. However, as history has shown, in many of the European countries, sport and physical culture have developed around the idea of voluntarism and amateurism during the last ca 100 years.

Liikuntamatkalla Suomessa : vapaa-ajan valintoja jälkimodernissa yhteiskunnassa

Screen media and non-screen media habits among preschool children in Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and Finland: Insights from an unsupervised clustering approach.

The main purpose of the research was to describe the daily screen media habits and non-screen media habits like indoor and outdoor play, and sleep of preschool children aged 2 to 6 years from Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and Finland using a content-validated online questionnaire (SMALLQ®) and unsupervised cluster analysis. Unsupervised cluster analysis on 5809 parent-reported weekday and weekend screen and non-screen media habits of preschool children from the four countries resulted in seven emergent clusters. Cluster 2 ( n = 1288) or the Early-screen media, screen media-lite and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity-lite family made up 22.2% and Cluster 1 ( n = 261) or the High-all-ro…

Meeting the WHO 24-h guidelines among 2–6-year-old children by family socioeconomic status before and during the COVID-19 pandemic : a repeated cross-sectional study

Background The World Health Organization (WHO) has developed guidelines for 24-h physical activity (PA), sedentary behaviour and sleep for young children. Lower socioeconomic status (SES) has been linked to a lower likelihood of meeting these guidelines. The outbreak of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) raised concerns about young children’s opportunities to meet the guidelines. The study focused on the prevalence of meeting the WHO’s 24-h guidelines on screen time (ST), PA and sleep among 2–6-year-old children, in association with family SES, before COVID-19 outbreak in 2019, and during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 in Finland. Methods Data were collected at three timepoints by an o…

Barriers to Sport Participation Faced by Ethiopian and Eritrean Migrant Women in Switzerland

Global migration (both forced and voluntary) has intensified the interaction between existing and emerging cultures. Sport has gained recognition as an effective tool for enhancing migrants’ overall wellbeing, active participation, and social integration. However, a growing number of studies have shown that migrant women have the lowest rate of sport participation, especially in organized clubs. These findings have brought the accessibility and inclusion of existing sport structure and culture in host countries into question. Using the six-factor model of constraints by Tsai and Coleman (1999), this study explored the barriers that hinder Ethiopian and Eritrea migrant women (EEMW) from part…

Social integration of Ethiopian and Eritrean women in Switzerland through informal sport settings

This study investigated the role of informal sport settings (i.e. self-organised and non-voluntary sports clubs) in the social integration of Ethiopian and Eritrean women into Swiss society. Social integration seen as a multidimensional, interdependent process between the interaction of social bond, bridge and links; and two-way interaction between the migrant and local community. Thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions (n���=���12, 18���51���years old) was used to understand the interplay between social integration and participation in informal sport settings. The findings indicated that such settings have become a crucial sphere for establishing and reb…

The Global Health and Fitness Industry at a Glance: Fast, Fit, Flexible, Functional, Funny, Fashionable and Fanatic

Over the past half century, participation in fitness has developed as one of the fastest growing forms of physical activity, especially in economically advanced countries. Nowadays, participation in fitness is an integral part of contemporary lifestyle as for millions of people around the world fitness has become a common practice in their daily life. Accordingly, fitness and health services have expanded tremendously given the high demand for fitness participation. Employees are catering to the needs of millions of fitness customers in many thousands of clubs and studios worldwide.

Finland: From Steering to the Evaluation of Effectiveness

The Finnish sport system consists of three major elements: voluntarism in sport clubs; the public sector with state subsidies for municipalities’ sport budgets; and the private sector’s offering of sport-related services and products. Participation in sport by Finns has traditionally been based on the combination of a strong civic sector and state support. Nowadays, however, as a result of the recent economic recession, the breakdown of the Nordic welfare model and changing values in relation to voluntary work, there have been changes in Finland in terms of the condition of sport and the relationship between the public and voluntary sectors. There has also been a decline in the level of sta…

Fitness in Finland: Department Stores of Healthy Life Styles

The main purposes of this article are to find out: how and why the popularity of fitness has evolved over the years in Finland and what kind of business activities in fitness nowadays exist. Fitness industry has grown strongly in the recent years in Finland, both in terms of the amount of companies and member rates. The growth can be explained by a variety of reasons. The increasing importance of global trends that emphasize health, well-being, physical capacity and good-looking appearance; the equality between genders in sports participation; the ageing of the population with senior citizens as gym users and the rise of the low-cost fitness segment is among the reasons that explain the pop…

Development, Current Situation and Future Prospects of the Private Sport Sector in Europe

This book outlined the private sport sector of the 18 European countries by using the Statistical classification of economic activities in the European Community (NACE Rev. 2, 2008) as a basic statistical framework. According on the country chapters European sport is divided into public, voluntary and private sectors. Depending on how strongly and through what kind of historical processes these sectors have developed, European countries taking part in this project can be classified as 1) historically and traditionally strong non-profit voluntary sport sector countries, 2) former Eastern Bloc countries and 3) countries with strong commercial sport activities. Based on the statistics, sport g…