| Summary: | ´The sportization of society´ has influenced a massive increase in sport participation, especially among youths. Young people therefore represent the largest proportion of sport participants, especially in formal sports. This is largely due to the impact of the late nineteenth century ideas of sport as possessing positive developmental benefits for participants and for society as a whole. These ideas have become the general viewpoint to youth sport in most Western societies, finding their way into Icelandic society in the late twentieth century. But parallel to the increase in sport participation, the diversity of opportunities to partake in different sports in different contexts has increased extensively. The increased diversity of modern sport forms has illustrated that all sports cannot be put under one and the same label in relation to the developmental outcomes of sport participation. Some sport forms are better equipped than others to contribute to potential developmental outcomes for their participants. Research on Icelandic youth sport shows that while various positive developmental outcomes can be attributed to participation in formal sport in sport clubs, they do not necessarily exist in informal sport, outside sport clubs. Informal sports are more individualistic and emergent in nature and seem to lack some of the social contextual elements that reside in formal sport. Therefore, it is important to disassemble the traditional definition of sport and to differentiate between different kinds of sports forms and contexts. By doing so we can analyze the developmental outcomes of sport participation more thoroughly and accurately. Since prior research has consistently shown the benefits of formal sport participation for Icelandic youth, the focus of this paper is primarily on formal youth sport. This paper seeks to investigate participation trends in formal youth sport in Iceland, and further, to identify some of the social characteristics of participants in different forms of sport, i.e. among those who ...
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