The Relationship Between Sport and Social-Emotional Skills

This study will look at the effect of sport on three categories of tasks that require socialemotional skills: (1) Achieving goals, (2) Working with others and (3) Manage emotions. The research question is twofold. First of all, what is the effect of participating in sport on socialemotional skills? Second, the sports will be divided in team sports and individual sports and the question will be investigated if participating in a team sport has a larger positive effect on life skills. These questions are investigated by using two empirical strategies: an OLS model with control variables and a fixed effects model. Data of the TRAILS study is used to investigate the questions. The TRAILS study is a prospective cohort study, started in 2001. Since then a group of young people from the Northern part of the Netherlands is closely monitored. Every two years, over 2,500 youngsters are subjected to questionnaires, interviews, and other tests. Based on the unique TRAILS data I concluded first of all, that participation in sport has a significant positive effect on the social-emotional skills associated with ‘working with others’. After making a distinction between individual sports and team sports, the estimates showed that participating in a team sport has a significant positive effect on the life skills associated with ‘managing emotions’, ‘achieving goals’, and ‘working with others’. The conclusions are checked by two different kinds of robustness tests. The robustness tests underscore the positive effect of team sport, however they also indicate that there could exist a reverse causality problem. More research will be needed to address this problem in order to achieve clearer and more robust conclusions.