Barriers to Sport For All Promotion in Universities

The purpose of present research was to investigate Barriers to sport for all promotion inthe Iranian universities. This field research was Descriptive–analytical and its statistical population was all of Iranian national universities’ faculties, staff and students. Finally, 779 people (233 faculties, 224 staff and 322 students) participated in the research and completed physical activity barriers’ questionnaire. The questionnaire was five-point likert type scale that its face and content validity verified by the experts and its reliability was calculated in a pilot study using Cronbach's alpha (α=0.956). Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with a Varimax rotation was used to identify factors. In EFA, of the 66 barriers, 58 items having appropriate factor loading were stand in six factors namely organizational and managerial, environmental, psychological, interpersonal, Lack of social support and time limitations. The results show that the most important factor is “organizational and managerial (3.22±0.85)” and the least important factor is “psychological (2.50±0.95)”. The research factors to be identified were determined by a combination of the following criteria: a) a pre-specification of the number of factors based on the literature review; b) factors selection based on eigenvalues greater than 1.0 (Kaiser criterion); c) visual inspectionon the basis of the scree-plot; d) variance description criterion; and e) comprehensibility of the extracted factors. Paying attention to barriers identified in the present research and trying to remove them can cause to mass participation of the academic society in universities’ physical activity and sport for all programs. In addition, in this research, based on identified barriers, some strategies were presented in order to development of sport for all in universities.