Irish Household Sports Expenditures – Household Composition and Household Size.

By John Eakins

Continuing my series of blog posts on Irish Household Sports Expenditures (previous posts here, here, and here), the following looks at household composition and household size. One would expect that the more persons in a household the larger the level of expenditure on sports related items but what might be of particular interest is the effect the composition of the household has on sports related expenditures, for example, households with children versus households without children.

We first examine the effect of household size using the figures below (Figs 1-4). The trends observed in examining the data in previous blogs can be seen here once again, that is, decreases in spending on spectator sports between 2009-10 and increases in the other categories of sports spending over the same period, most notably for sports participation and subscription to sports and social clubs.

A number of additional features of the graphs below are worth pointing out. For both sports participation and subscription to sports and social clubs, the larger increases are for households with 4 or more persons present. For example, spending on sports participation for households with 5 persons has increased 3 fold while subscriptions to sports and social clubs for households with 4 persons has more than doubled and for households with 6 or more persons has also increased 3 fold. In short, it’s appears that large households are driving the increase in sports spending. (It should be also be noted that the proportion of households with 4 or more persons in both HBS samples is roughly the same so this is a real increase in spending).

It is probable that the patterns identified above are driven to a large extent by income. I have mentioned in previous blogs that spending on sports participation and subscriptions to sports clubs has increased primarily because of increases in spending by middle and high earners. Thus the more people in a household, the more the overall level of increase in household income.

I also suggested that income may not be the only factor however. The figures below (Figs 5-8) examine the effect that household composition has on sports spending. Again, the overall pattern of decreases in spending on spectator sports and increases in the other categories of sports spending is evident across the categories of household composition.

If we focus on spending on sports participation and subscription to sports and social clubs, we see an interesting pattern emerging. In the case of spending on sports participation, the larger increases are for those households with children present. In contrast for subscription to sports and social clubs the larger increases are (generally) for those households without children present. Thus it could be suggested that while spending on both categories is been driven by larger households, one (participant sports) is more due to the presence of children while the other (subscription to sports and social clubs) is more due to income increases. Fees to leisure classes are also more affected by the presence of children in the households than income (although not to the same extent as participant sports).

Whether children are present in the household or not and its effect on sports expenditures is an interesting topic. The conventional view is that children can preclude a household from engaging in sport due to time constraints. What the analysis presented in this blog suggests is that it depends on the type of sports/leisure activity the household engages in. Having children in the home may be a barrier to joining a sports club but it does not necessarily mean that the household cannot engage in a form of sports participation or leisure activity. Whilst we cannot say who is doing the sports/leisure activity (it could be just the children) this is a welcome trend for the overall health of Irish households.