RACE, ETHNICITY AND SPORTS PARTICIPATION METHODOLOGY

"Ethnicity and Sports Participation" is the first sports survey to integrate a compensatory oversample of minorities with a precisely targeted sample balancing methodology. As such it reflects the true multicultural diversity of Black, Hispanic, Asian and Native Americans—projecting accurate national sports participation estimates for all these groups across 103 sports/activities. The ethnic and racial sports data are also segmented by various indicators of health and fitness: health club membership, exercise, bodyweight, BMI and weight loss behavior.

The data are derived from the SUPERSTUDY® of Sports Participation, the definitive annual consumer mail panel survey of 25,000 adults and children across the U.S., conducted every year since 1987. To glean a more accurate measure of racial and ethnic sports participation, the core study was augmented by an oversample of 3,000 minority households—increasing the questionnaire mailout to 28,000. Surveys were mailed to each of 28,000 households from the consumer mail panel of NFO Worldwide, during January 4–5, 2005.

One individual over the age of 6 in each household was pre-selected to complete a four-page questionnaire booklet. Where the designated respondent was a young child, the parent was instructed to fill out the booklet for him or her.

No incentives were offered, nor were reminder cards mailed to respondents. At the conclusion of the fieldwork, 16,546 booklets had been returned for a response rate of 59%. A total of 16,160 usable questionnaires comprised the final sample, so each respondent in the study represents 16,244 people in the U.S. population of 262,499,000.

To fairly portray minority demographics in the U.S. population, ASD devised a proprietary sample weighting methodology, reanalyzing U.S. Census data to produce 4 separate matrices containing 170 demographic cells (sub-groups).