Leisure Sciences, 22:19–31, 2000 Copyright C ° 2000 Taylor & Francis 0149-0400/00 $12.00 + .00 Men’s and Women’s Involvement in Sports: An Examination of the Gendered Aspects of Leisure Involvement CAROLINE G. E. WILEY SUSAN M. SHAW MARK E. HAVITZ Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario, Canada Although involvement has emerged as an important concept for understanding leisure behavior, the gendered nature of involvement has received scant attention. The purpose of this study was to examine and compare the leisure involvement proles of female and male participants in “conforming” (gender-appropriate) and “nonconforming” (gender-inappropriate) activities. Specically, the study involved a survey of general sports involvement and specic activity involvement among adult recreational hockey players (51 men and 76 women) and gure skaters (24 men and 54 women). Multiple analysis of covariance was used to test for gender and sport-type differences with regard to overall involvement scores as well as scores for the three main facets of involvement (attraction, centrality, and self-expression). As hypothesized, male hockey players had higher centrality scores compared with the other groups. The results, however, also showed that the women had higher activity-attraction scores, the female gure skaters reported the highest activity self-expression, and the female hockey players had the highest attraction for sports in general. The theoretic implications of these results are discussed. In particular, it is suggested that leisure involvement may be inuenced by so- cietal ideologies about the gender-appropriateness of activities, as well as by individual interests and preferences. Keywords gure skating, gender, hockey, leisure involvement, sports Involvement has emerged as an important concept for understanding leisure behavior. De- veloped as part of social-judgment theory (Sherif & Cantril, 1947; Sherif & Hovland, 1961), the idea of involvement originally was used to refer to personal relevance to self or ego. More specically, involvement was conceptualized as an attitude that an individual develops or learns through interaction with his or her social environment (Sherif, Sherif, & Neber- gall, 1965). This attitude was seen to represent a determination about what is important, meaningful, or relevant and thus to be used by individuals in making judgments about self and others and subsequently in making decisions about behaviors. By the mid-1960s, the concept of involvement had been adopted by some consumer- behavior researchers (e.g., Krugman, 1965). In this context, the purpose was to help pre- dict consumer behavior and expenditure patterns. This use of the term led to some minor Received 30 April 1999; accepted 15 November 1999. Address correspondence to Susan M.Shaw, Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1. E-mail: sshaw@healthy.uwaterloo.ca 19