Study: Loneliness And Sports Skill Linked

(WebMD)  In grade school, children's loneliness may reflect their skill - or lack thereof - on the playing field.

Researchers from Canada's University of Alberta report that news in the Journal of Sport Behavior.

If you were the king of the kickball field - or the last to be picked for a playground team - in elementary school, you may find their findings familiar.

The study included 99 boys and 109 girls in grades 4-6 in seven western Canadian elementary schools.

In surveys, the students rated their athletic skill and the athletic skills of their classmates.

They also rated their loneliness by noting how much they agreed or disagreed with statements such as "I feel lonely at school," and "I have lots of friends in my class."

In addition, the children rated their classmates' popularity.

For instance, they were asked to imagine going on a school trip with their entire class and choosing three classmates that they would most and least like to be with during the trip.

The most popular kids rated their athletic skills highly, and so did their peers.

The loneliest children didn't consider themselves athletic - and their classmates agreed.

Which came first: children's loneliness or lack of sports skills? This study, which the researchers say is the first to look at this topic, doesn't settle that.

It's possible that lonely children overestimate how bad they are at sports.

Past research suggests that "loneliness provides a negative lens through which people interpret the world," write Janice Causgrove Dunn, PhD, and colleagues.

Kids can be lonely for many reasons apart from sports, but "athletic ability or athletic competence may be one such factor," the researchers write.

By Miranda Hitti
Reviewed by Louise Chang
©2007 WebMD, Inc. All rights reserved

[eggy1620]

I wonder if the study discriminated between boys and girls responses? I think most would agree that the study%u2019s results are right on when the person being rated is a boy. But the correlation is probably much weaker when the person being rated is a girl. Not so much in elementary or middle school, but in high school, a girl%u2019s athletic skills have no bearing on her popularity. The only muscles she would need developed to be popular are the ones that open up her legs.

[mitywhity]

Those normally-functioning kids you tout will work for the misfits one day. Mark it down. Maybe your little jock will want to work for one of my little entrepreneurs one day! I''ll check with them when they get home and see if they need a guy in the warehouse!

[mitywhity]

The reason is the misplaced value of human life we promote in the media. If you aren''t fast, strong, athletic and into sports then you appear as a weirdo to the other kids who are fresh off of 4 - 5 hours of cable TV from the night before. Take Mr. Nobody Michael Vick - how many other dogfighters have been prosecuted bfore you even knew that it was illegal? Vick throws a little brown ball around and runs around in tight pants and all of a sudden his name warrants the attention of the world on the subject of dogfighting? I was small and didn''t play team sports because I was a shrimp and it wasn''t until I grew huge and wrestled did I become...cool. Pathetic! My kids know that grades, attitude and hard work are the only sports we play around the house and there are no TVs in the house with any sports on them at all. I feel for these little guys and also for the big guys who really don''t know any better.