The effect of school sports facilities on physical activity, health and socioeconomic status in adulthood
File(s)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Black, Nicole
Shields, Michael
Propper, Carol
Johnston, David
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
This paper focuses on the long-term impacts of attending a high school with inadequate sports facilities. We use prospective data from the British National Child Development Study, a continuing panel of a cohort of 17,634 children born in Great Britain during a single week of March 1958. Our empirical approach exploits the educational system they were exposed to: children were sorted by educational ability at age 11, but conditional on educational ability, attended their closest school. This produces quasi-random variation in the quality of the school sports facilities across respondents. We use this variation between cohort members residing within the same local authority area, and focus on outcome measures of physical activity, health, health-related lifestyle activities, and socioeconomic status, collected at ages between 33 and 50 years. We control for any potential links between the inadequacy of sports facilities and inadequacy of other facility types, and test that allocation to school type is random with respect to pre-high school observables. We find that attending a school with inadequate sports facilities led to a statistically significant, modest decrease in the likelihood of physical activity participation during adulthood. In contrast, we find no evidence that inadequate sports facilities worsened adulthood measures of physical and mental health, lifestyle or socioeconomic status.
Date Issued
2019-01-01
Date Acceptance
2018-10-28
Citation
Social Science and Medicine, 2019, 220, pp.120-128
ISSN
0277-9536
Publisher
Elsevier
Start Page
120
End Page
128
Journal / Book Title
Social Science and Medicine
Volume
220
Copyright Statement
© 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This manuscript is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Subjects
Adult health
Exercise
Longitudinal
Physical activity
Sports facilities
1117 Public Health And Health Services
1601 Anthropology
1608 Sociology
Public Health
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2018-10-30