Abstract

Research into the motives that lead young people to practice sport has been carried out in English-speaking countries, mainly in the United States and the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada. It has consistently shown a framework with various factors. The majority can be placed within the frame of social recognition and are based on the concept of achievement motivation. Starting from these results our objective has been to analyse the underlying motivational structure with the aim of determining the most prominent tendencies in contemporary sport. The young people polled were 2689 students at the University of Oviedo (1440 men and 1249 women). They all answered questionnaires drawn up for our purpose. The results revealed a double bipolar structure that would appear to respond to the binarisation of two criteria: competition (C) and mastery(M) or expertise. Their presence or absence gives rise to a dichotomy, which could be likened to a tree with a bifurcated trunk and four branches. The four sub-groups show, moreover, certain special characteristics arising from differences in sex, type of activity and strength of motivation to practise sport. Finally the tresults are discussed and some conclusions are drawn.