No link between education and playing 'high status' sports

Education plays no part in influencing the type of sports people choose to participate in, research scientists have found.

A new study published by the Journal of Health and Social behaviour indicated that the type of physical exercise people choose to participate in has much more to do with race than level of education.

"We assumed that people with higher levels of education were more likely to be in prestigious fields such as law or medicine, and if we think about the physical activities that lawyers and doctors participate in, they are often sports like golf or tennis," explained study co-author Jarron M Saint Onge, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Houston.

He said that the scientists expected that, regardless of race-ethnicity, people in the upper levels of education would gravitate towards these 'high-status' sports.

However, the expert claimed that the study illustrated that far from education narrowing the differences in exercise habits in races, it actually made them more apparent, with black people tending to gravitate towards team sports and white people undertaking facility-based exercise.