socioeconomic position

Physical activity occurs in a range of contexts and for a range of reasons, including home and neighbourhood, school playground, physical education classes, active transport and sport. Recent studies, one using self-reported physical activity 1 and another using accelerometry as an objective measure,2 have reported meaningful contributions of organised sport, accounting for ~20% of daily physical activity. Booth and colleagues, using a self-report of physical activity pendants clearance Australian adolescents, estimated that this contribution may be as high as 40%. 3

Engagement in organised sport has been associated with higher physical fitness 4 and lower levels of body fat 5 among youth. Apart from positive links with physical health, extra-curricular sport participation was related to higher selfconcept in a study of tiffany bangle children.6 Congruent with these findings, Pate and colleagues found that participation in sports was positively associated with healthy behaviours such as fruit and vegetable intake, and abstinence from cigarette smoking and drug use among USA high school students.7

Participation in organised sport among youth has increased in recent years.3'6,8 However this trend is not uniform across the spectrum of socioeconomic position.8-10 While school sport participation has increased among 9-13 tiffany jewellery old in Victoria, Australia, between 1 985 and 2001 ,8 the rate of increase has been much higher among high socioeconomic position (SEP) compared with low SEP children. Less frequent sport participation among low SEP children has also been reported from Europe 9,10 and the USA.11

Efforts to address inequities in physical activity behaviours such as sport participation need to be based upon an understanding of the sociodemographic distribution of the behaviour within the target age group, the strongest correlates of the behaviour in that age group, and the sociodemographic distribution of these correlates within the target age group. ' * No published studies could be located that examine SEP grathents in hypothesised correlates of youth sport participation. Accordingly, the aim of this study was to identify relationships between SEP and sport participation among South Australian youth, and to explore SEP grathents in personal, social and environmental mediators of participation.