The main motivation for this study lies in the importance sports have in our nowadays society and, more specifically, in the role sport organizations play as merging factor between sports and social relations. The main objective of this study is the analysis of the variables that have an effect on the decision of an individual to become a member of a given sport club. The proposed methodology of using a heteroskedastic binary choice model, and its application to a data set obtained from the survey of Spanish sport habits collected in the year 2005, allows us to be able to obtain a detailed analysis of the effect the different variables set have on the probability to become a member of a sport club. Results show that the demand of a sport club membership is closely related to individual characteristics such as gender, level of education, physical fitness and if the individual is an athlete or not.
The effects of neighbours on sport club membership
