Sport orientations and body cultures of adolescent migrants in relationof school and everyday life

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Michael Meuser; Professor Dr. Jörg Thiele
• Subject Area: Education Systems and Educational Institutions
• Term: from 2014 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 246493936

School appears to particularly prefer and support those patterns of knowledge and action that are conveyed to adolescents in the educated class. This research project focuses on adolescent migrants who represent a disproportionately large number of a so-called educationally disadvantaged group within our society. The field of physical activity and sport can help initially in strengthen the agency of that group and in readjusting the often difficult relationship between schools and their students with migrant background. Since sport is considered to play a peripheral role in defining academic success it could actually strengthen a rapprochement by schools and their students because it provides an area where matters of selection and societal recognition play a minor role. School sport may represent one of the few opportunities to some students for generating a sense of achievement in school since sport is among the most popular leisure activities of adolescents outside of school.Based on quantitative and qualitative data, this research project studies socialization mechanism that contribute to varying participation rates of adolescents with migrant backgrounds in schools, in extracurricular exercise and in sports practices. The central focus is to analyze to what extent specific patterns of agency are preferred in school sport, in other words to what extent any kind of school sport, especially physical education, is oriented toward values and norm preferences of more highly educated social milieus. The project consists of two related parts: (1) A secondary analysis of data from the representative Sprint study with 7,436 seventh- and ninth-graders, including 1,722 migrants, and the option of linking student data with parent and teacher data; (2) Group discussions with 16 natural groups of same-aged boys and girls with a Turkish background in a longitudinal design (grade 7 and 9). The goal is to evaluate how gender, social class, migration and their intersections predict the socialization process of teenagers in school sport as well as extracurricular sport. The socio-somatic cultures of migrants will be investigated with regard to their construction processes, their possible ethnic connotations accomplished in practices of self-attributions and attributions by others as well as their realization in everyday life. Furthermore we ask how migrants perceive, judge and influence physical education, school sport and extracurricular physical activities through their own decisions. Based on these preliminary results, initial consequences for the construction of school sport attempting to realize the guiding principle of agency shall be derived.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants