AI Insight
This paper presents a theoretical framework for understanding how older adults access and use sport-related resources to participate in physical activity. The framework applies the Capability Approach to distinguish between merely having access to resources and actually being able to convert those resources into meaningful participation opportunities. It identifies three key conversion processes—mastery, agency, and relational-identity—that determine whether resources lead to enhanced competence, social connectedness, and successful aging outcomes, while also acknowledging that access alone does not guarantee meaningful participation.
Why it matters
The framework provides researchers and policymakers with a structured approach to identify barriers that prevent older adults from converting available sport resources into actual participation, potentially reducing inequality in later-life physical activity. It shifts focus from simply providing access to facilities toward understanding the personal, social, and environmental conditions needed for meaningful engagement in sport and exercise among aging populations.
Understand the Science
This paper develops the concept of participatory sport consumption in later life, referring to older adults’ acquisition, access, use, and combination of sport-related resources that support their own participation in sport and exercise. Drawing on the Capability Approach, the paper distinguishes resource availability from the substantive opportunities older adults are able to exercise and value. The proposed framework identifies personal, socioeconomic and relational, and environmental and service conditions as determinants of resource convertibility. Mastery, agency, and relational-identity conversion are specified as capability-building processes, with competence and connectedness as proximal manifestations and later-life functionings as possible outcomes. The framework also incorporates capability failure, recognising that access or participation may coexist with restricted opportunity. It provides a basis for examining how sport-related resources contribute to capability expansion and inequality in later-life participation.