Assessment of factors affecting the barriers of elderly women participation in recreational sport activities in Tehran Province

Background: The purpose of this study was to investigate the factors affecting the barriers of elderly women participation in recreational sport activities in Tehran Province.Materials and Methods: Statistical population of research comprised all women over 50 years of Tehran province. The sample was selected by random cluster method among the whole of subjects in Tehran Province and were divided according to the geographical distribution of three regions in the center, north and south of the province, and 384 subjects were chosen randomly. In order to achieve the research goals, some qualitative and quantitative research methods were used. In the qualitative research semi-structured interviews and a conceptual interview were used. In the quantitative research the researchermade questionnaire was used and validity was confirmed by 15 professors and experts and the reliability was calculated as 0/83 in a pilot study by the Cronbach s alpha. Moreover, for the data analysis, descriptive and inferential statistics (single-group t-test, Friedman test) were used by SPSS18 software. Results and Discussions: The findings showed that social factors, health facilities, economic factors, personal factors and time are the main barriers for elder women s participation in recreational sport activities in Tehran Province and the lack of interest and information are not important barriers to participate for elder women in recreational sport activities in Tehran province. Conclusion: factors of interest and ignorance are not the effective factors in the lack of participation of older women in recreational sport activities with regard to the t-statistic and significance level.

Keywords:

Barriers , elderly women , sports participation , recreational sports activities