Socio-economic insecurity, anomy and rituals. Sports habits in higher education students of the Opal Coast littoral

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe some features of sports habits among a population of higher education students of the Opal Coast littoral (France). As part of the Universanté observatorys activities (University of the Littoral Opal Coast, Artois University and Lille 2 University), this work has been carried out on a subset of approximately 800 students of the Opal Coast area. We will refer both to some aspects related to the macroscopic context, and to some mesoscopic ones. The first concern the Nord-Pas de Calais region, in particular the Opal Coast littoral area; the second are drawn from the Universanté research data. The data collected depicts the socio-demographic profile of the Opal Coast littorals students, and allows us to focus on some features and some of the main criticalities concerning this areas high education students sport practice: socio-economic insecurity, the relationship between alcohol consumption and sports habits, risky behaviours. In particular, we will stress the importance of the amount of the participants concerned by regular and risky punctual alcohol consumption episodes crossing this data with sports club participation : those who declare to drink 6 glasses of alcoholic beverages one time per month or more are 42.4 % of the respondents. We will propose some interpretative keys to frame these phenomena. The first interpretative is related to the social environment, the second one to a new conception of risk emerging in youth subcultures.