What Drives the Baby-boomer Athletes? An Empirical Study of the Exercise Motivation of Senior Athletes

Abstract

The primary purpose of this study was to acquire greater insights about the baby-boomers by developing a thorough understanding of the consumer and the psychological reasons driving motivations and participation in exercise and sport activities. Specifically, this research project aimed to construct the consumer typologies based on participant motivation. A total of 270 baby-boomer athletes participated in this research and 262 surveys were successfully completed. A 12-item instrument was devised on the front page of the survey to examine demographic, lifestyle, and athletic profiles of the sample. Participant Motivations Questionnaire (PMQ) (Gill, Gross, & Huddleston, 1983) was used as the research instrument to measure the motivation factors. T-tests revealed that teamwork driven motivation was significantly different by gender indicating that female seniors were more likely to have teamwork driven motivation than their male counterparts, t(230) = -2.69, p<.01. Two-step cluster analysis found that the motivation level did not affect the weekly training hours of baby-boomer athletes.