The interplay between parental behaviors and adolescents’ sports-related values in understanding adolescents’ dropout of organized sports activities

Using short-term longitudinal data, the primary goal of the present study was to examine the interplay betweenadolescents’ sports-related intrapersonal (e.g., sports values) and interpersonal factors (e.g., perceived parentalinvolvement) in relation to sports dropout. A secondary goal was to explore the direction of effects in the as-sociation between intra- and interpersonal factors. A total of 420 adolescents (39% girls, Mage = 14.06; SDage =0.33) responded to a set of survey questions over two consecutive years. Results from structural equationmodeling suggested that parental involvement predicted adolescents’ dropout one year later, via sports values.Further, the results suggested that the direction of influence is mainly from parents to adolescents. Overall, thefindings indicate that adolescents whose parents attend their practices and games perceive sports activities asfun, important and useful; as a result, adolescents are less likely to dropout. The findings offer an improvedunderstanding of how parents’ behaviors may influence adolescents’ dropout of organized sports.