Assessment of motivations of masters athletes at the World Masters Games

Authors: Joe Walsh, Ian Timothy Heazlewood, Mark DeBeliso, Mike Climstein

Corresponding Author:
Joe Walsh
School of Psychological and Clinical Sciences
Faculty of Engineering, Health, Science and the Environment
Charles Darwin University
Darwin, NT, 0909
Australia
jo.walsh@cdu.edu.au
+618 8946 7215

Joe Walsh is affiliated with The School of Psychological and Clinical Sciences, Faculty of Engineering, Health, Science and the Environment, Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia.
Ian Timothy Heazlewood is Associate Professor and Theme Leader Exercise and Sport Science in The School of Psychological and Clinical Sciences, Faculty of Engineering, Health, Science and the Environment, Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia.

Mark DeBeliso is Professor, Department of Physical Education and Human Performance, Southern Utah University, Cedar City, USA

Dr. Mike Climstein (FASMF, FACSM, FAAESS, AEP) is with Clinical Exercise Physiology, Southern Cross University, School of Health and Human Sciences, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia; Adjunct Associate Professor with The University of Sydney, Exercise, Health and Performance Faculty Research Group, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, and Adjunct Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Water Based Research Unit, Bond University, Robina, Queensland, Australia.

Assessment of motivations of masters athletes at the World Masters Games

ABSTRACT
The Motivations of Marathoners Scales (MOMS) is a quantitative instrument for assessing motivation of marathon participants. A large sample of masters athletes completed the MOMS as part of a questionnaire at the World Masters Games (WMG), the world’s largest multisport event. The aim of this research project was to document statistical patterns within this sample for the psychological variables in the MOMS. As the MOMS had been used for 25 years, this large sample represented a good opportunity to document patterns in the application of the MOMS psychometric tool and recommendations for those interested in promoting masters sports, based upon the participant motivations to compete. Statistically significant patterns were identified in the motivations of the 3,928 participants (2,010 male, 1,918 female) who completed the 56 question MOMS survey. As well as gender-based differences in motivations, 37 of the 56 questions were identified as being more or less important motivators by the participants. The most motivation for the cohort as a whole was given by the item construct “to socialize with other participants”, though there were also significant differences between the two genders. The weight control questions indicated these masters athletes did not place a priority on this construct, thus focusing marketing initiatives on constructs such as weight control may be ineffective. For promotion of participation in masters sport and by inference physical activity at older ages, marketing initiatives would focus on such constructs as to compete with others, to improving sporting performance, socialization, health improvement, improving physical fitness, feeling a sense of achievement, pushing oneself beyond current limits and staying in physical condition, all of which were more highly rated by participants than weight control.

Keywords: motivations of marathoners scales, sport participation, masters athlete, veteran athlete

INTRODUCTION
The Motivations of Marathoners Scales (MOMS) (37) is a valid and reliable, quantitative instrument for assessing motivation of marathon participants. Participant motivation evaluates those factors that enhance or inhibit motivation to participate and are represented by factors such as health orientation, weight concern/weight loss and personal goal achievement (36, 37). The MOMS is a psychometric instrument based upon a series of 56 questions and scored on a seven-point Likert scale (35). The MOMS instrument was constructed around nine re-occurring themes that had been reported in the preceding literature by marathon runners as reasons for participating in marathons (37). These themes were general health orientation, weight concern, affiliation, recognition, personal goal achievement, competition, coping, self-esteem and life meaning. The themes can in turn be clustered into four areas, namely: physical health, social, achievement, and psychological (37). Using a pool of different questions for each theme, Masters and colleagues (37) statistically tested these constructs and selected the most appropriate. The MOMS scale has been adopted to investigate athletes competing in other sports (other than marathon), including at both multi-sport events (22, 23) and individual sports tournaments such as rugby (31). Data collected using the MOMS scale has also been used as a convenience sample for demonstrating applications of data mining techniques that can be used in exercise science and exercise psychology (30).

This manuscript focuses on application of the MOMS psychometric tool to masters athletes. As defined by Raeburn and Dascombe (42), masters athletes are those systematically training for and competing in organized sporting events designed specifically for older adults. The biggest masters sporting event (by participant number) is the World Masters Games (WMG). Governed by the International Masters Games Association, the WMG are a non-invitational, quadrennial, international, multi-sport event. In terms of competitor numbers, the WMG has developed into the world’s largest international sports tournament.

Although the WMG have been in existence since 1985, surprisingly there was limited scientific literature available on this specific cohort. An international team of researchers was thus formed to investigate the nexus between aging, physical activity, indices of health and the global obesity epidemic by investigating those competing in masters sport.

The benefits of participation in masters athletic competition had been previously investigated with Seals (47) and others reporting positive adaptations in musculoskeletal health (15, 19, 69), improved glycaemia (41, 43) and considerable health benefits associated with the long-term exercise participation (16, 20, 34, 44, 49). Although long-term participation in sport (and physical activity (39)) is advocated by health professionals, the advanced age of participants is also commonly associated with an increased incidence of chronic diseases such as coronary artery disease (5, 50), hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, and type 2 diabetes mellitus (69). Research on the masters athletes competing at the Sydney WMG has included research on body mass index (53, 54, 60, 62, 63), injury incidence (9, 29, 55, 64) and health (6, 7, 10-13, 56-58) of competitors.

The questions identified in the MOMS have been demonstrated (4, 18, 40, 45) as important motivational constructs and have been used by sport psychology researchers for 25 years. A number of studies have been conducted on the MOMS in the context of masters athletes (1-3, 21-24, 26-28, 48, 59). Researchers have investigated prediction of gender from the sports psychological data in the MOMS (25, 66, 67). Being able to predict gender or other attributes of participants from MOMS data has value of its own based solely on the additional information produced. Additionally, further research on relationships between gender classification prediction and this scale may lead to supplementary insights that might assist in other research using the MOMS instrument. Heazlewood and colleagues (32) re-evaluated the first and second order factor structure of the MOMS instrument with masters athletes, the factor structure identified in the original MOMS instrument was not reproduced with the WMG male and female cohorts.

A large sample of masters athletes completed the MOMS as part of a questionnaire at a large multisport event. The manuscript will include measures of central tendency and dispersion for Likert responses for all respondents and also with responses split by gender. The manuscript will also include comparison between genders for each of the 56 questions. The purpose of this research project was to document descriptive statistics and significant statistical patterns within this data for the psychological variables in the MOMS. As the MOMS had been used for many years, this large sample represented a good opportunity to document patterns in the application of the MOMS psychometric tool and recommendations for those interested in promoting masters sports, based on the participant motivations to compete. It was hypothesised that there would be significant differences between the two genders. These differences were assumed based on the success achieved in past research (25, 66, 67) predicting participant gender from MOMS data.

METHODOLOGY
Approval for this study was granted by a university research ethics committee in accordance with the ethical standards of the Helsinki Declaration of 1975 (revised in 2008). The 2009 Sydney World Masters Games Organising Committee approved the project, stipulating the survey must only be provided in an online format so there was minimal disruption to the participants during the WMG. An online survey was created using Limesurveytm, an open-source, web-based application to deliver the survey. Filters were used in the participant questionnaires to abbreviate response times. Following pilot testing by investigators, electronic invitations were sent to masters games athletes who provided a valid email address upon registration. The survey consisted of several sections. These sections featured questions related to the following areas: information for participants, a privacy statement, participant demographics, participant medical history (personal and family), past surgical procedures, prescribed medications, physiologic data and psychological participation factors.

The MOMS (37) was used to gauge the importance of a range of psychological factors in determining sports participation. The age ranges in the research used to develop the MOMS survey instrument (37) had significant overlap with age ranges of participants at the WMG (7, 12, 13, 52). The MOMS scale featured 56 questions clustered within nine scales, which in turn were clustered in four areas. To complete the MOMS participants rated each of the items according to the scale in terms of how important it was as a reason for their participation in sport. A score of 1 would indicate that the item is “not a reason” for participation, whereas a score of 7 indicates that the item is a “very important reason” for participation and scores in-between these extremes represented relative degrees of each reason. The following are sample questions which sought responses to word stems such as; “to control my weight”, “to compete with others”, “to earn respect of peers”, “to improve my sporting performance”, “to earn respect of people in general”, “to socialize with other participants”, “to improve my health”, “to compete with myself”, “to become less anxious”, “to improve my self-esteem”, “to have something in common with other people”, “to add a sense of meaning to my life”, “to prolong my life” and “to become less depressed.” The full list of 56 words stems used are included in the results section. Analysis of this psychometric data was completed using the programming language R, version 3.5.0 (2018-04-23) “Joy in Playing” on platform x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0 (64-bit) running under OS X El Capitan 10.11.3.

Heazlewood et al. (28) had conducted analysis of mean and standard deviations for participant motivation factor scores by gender summarising trends by adopting the underlying factors in the MOMS as applied to the WMG. These were calculated to assess trends as well as cross tabulations of BMI categories with gender. Due to the evidence of superior predictive scores utilising the 56 questions in the MOMS, as opposed to collapsing into underlying factors (67), the analysis in this manuscript was conducted using the raw 56 item constructs in the survey tool, as opposed to condensing them into the underlying factors (as per the MOMS structure). As well as reporting descriptive statistics in the form of measures of central tendency and dispersion, statistical analysis was conducted to investigate the differences in scoring the 56 items between the two genders. Comparison was made between genders using Welch two sample t-tests for each of the 56 questions. The Welch t-test was considered preferable over Student’s t-test due to no dependence on equal variances between independent groups (38, 46). To consider a difference between the genders to be statistical significant, the required level of significance α, was set a priori at p=0.05.

RESULTS
The 2009 Sydney World Masters Games featured 28,089 competitors representing 95 countries and competing in 28 sports (52). In fact, the largest ever attendance at a WMG event was in Sydney, making this the largest international sports tournament (in terms of participant numbers) in the modern era. A total of 3,928 masters athletes (14.0% of competitors) completed all questions utilized in the analysis in this manuscript. Participation at the Sydney WMG was open to sports people of all abilities and most ages, the minimum age criterion ranged between 25 and 35 years depending upon the sport.
Table 1 illustrates the mean and standard deviation of scores for each of the 56 questions in the MOMS for the WMG masters athletes. The word stem for each MOMS question is included. The mean scores are reported in the last two columns for both male and female masters athletes.

Table 1: Measures of central tendency and dispersion for Likert responses for all respondents and also with responses split by gender. Data is summarised to 3 decimal places.

Item Constructs	Both Genders Combined		Male Mean	Female Mean
	Mean	Standard Deviation
To control my weight	3.593	2.070	3.472	3.721
To compete with others	5.207	1.696	5.355	5.051
To earn respect of peers	3.073	1.862	3.237	2.901
To reduce my weight	3.013	1.980	2.959	3.070
To improve my sporting performance	5.203	1.716	5.185	5.223
To earn respect of people in general	2.866	1.780	2.975	2.752
To socialize with other participants	5.713	1.498	5.476	5.960
To improve my health	5.554	1.662	5.485	5.627
To compete with myself	4.789	2.000	4.987	4.583
To become less anxious	2.461	1.770	2.454	2.468
To improve my self-esteem	3.075	1.984	3.062	3.089
To have something in common with other people	3.737	1.992	3.630	3.848
To add a sense of meaning to my life	3.692	2.036	3.579	3.812
To prolong my life	4.345	2.101	4.394	4.295
To become less depressed	2.399	1.863	2.371	2.429
To meet people	4.727	1.879	4.456	5.011
To become more physically fit	5.669	1.542	5.548	5.795
To distract myself from daily worries	3.294	1.986	3.257	3.333
To make my family and friends proud of me	2.973	1.814	2.951	2.996
To make my life more purposeful	3.310	1.951	3.231	3.393
To look leaner	3.408	1.981	3.319	3.502
To try to perform better	5.076	1.723	5.144	5.005
To feel more confident about myself	3.677	2.008	3.580	3.780
To participate with my family or friends	4.858	2.008	4.563	5.168
To make myself feel whole	3.020	1.980	2.991	3.052
To reduce my chance of having a heart attack	3.527	2.053	3.649	3.400
To make myself more complete	3.349	1.981	3.358	3.340
To improve my mood	3.388	1.982	3.275	3.507
To improve my sense of self-worth	2.962	1.904	2.928	2.998
To share a group identity with other participants	4.267	1.965	4.113	4.428
It is a positive emotional experience	4.905	1.854	4.744	5.074
To feel proud of myself	4.498	1.964	4.328	4.676
To visit with friends	4.304	2.018	3.943	4.684
To feel a sense of achievement	5.142	1.610	5.000	5.291
To push myself beyond my current limit	5.214	1.707	5.148	5.282
To have time alone to sought things out	2.650	1.847	2.605	2.698
To say in physical condition	5.438	1.645	5.381	5.498
To concentrate on my thoughts	2.766	1.870	2.800	2.729
To solve problems	2.388	1.693	2.374	2.404
To see how high I can place in my sport	4.310	2.116	4.563	4.045
To feel a sense of belonging in nature	2.677	1.876	2.633	2.723
To stay physically attractive	3.880	2.019	3.862	3.899
To get a better performance than my friends	2.628	1.815	2.923	2.318
To prevent illness	4.151	2.034	4.168	4.133
People will look up to me	2.476	1.671	2.579	2.369
To see if I can beat a certain performance	4.183	2.112	4.451	3.901
To blow off steam	2.984	1.926	2.924	3.048
Brings me recognition	2.596	1.743	2.750	2.435
To have time alone with the world	2.329	1.756	2.372	2.285
To get away from it all	2.673	1.856	2.608	2.740
To make my body better than before	4.345	1.960	4.414	4.273
To beat someone I’ve never beaten before	3.104	2.041	3.342	2.855
To feel mentally in my control of my body	3.662	2.057	3.744	3.577
To get compliments from others	2.464	1.657	2.575	2.347
To feel at peace with the world	2.634	1.868	2.630	2.638
To feel like a winner	3.500	2.042	3.583	3.413

Table 2 reports a comparison made between genders for each of the 56 questions using a Welch two sample t-test, a t-test preferable over Student’s t-test due to no dependence on equal variances between independent groups (38, 46).

Item Constructs	Welch two sample t-test		Interpretation
	t	p-value
To control my weight	3.780	0.000159	Female score significantly higher
To compete with others	-5.625	1.988e-08	Male score significantly higher
To earn respect of peers	-5.675	1.487e-08	Male score significantly higher
To reduce my weight	1.759	0.07874	NS
To improve my sporting performance	0.704	0.4814	NS
To earn respect of people in general	-3.938	8.378e-05	Male score significantly higher
To socialize with other participants	10.291	< 2.2e-16	Female score significantly higher
To improve my health	2.671	0.007589	Female score significantly higher
To compete with myself	-6.338	2.595e-10	Male score significantly higher
To become less anxious	0.247	0.8051	NS
To improve my self-esteem	0.425	0.6707	NS
To have something in common with other people	3.435	0.0005991	Female score significantly higher
To add a sense of meaning to my life	3.589	0.0003363	Female score significantly higher
To prolong my life	-1.482	0.1385	NS
To become less depressed	0.965	0.3348	NS
To meet people	9.359	< 2.2e-16	Female score significantly higher
To become more physically fit	5.026	5.237e-07	Female score significantly higher
To distract myself from daily worries	1.197	0.2316	NS
To make my family and friends proud of me	0.769	0.4418	NS
To make my life more purposeful	2.589	0.009667	Female score significantly higher
To look leaner	2.880	0.003995	Female score significantly higher
To try to perform better	-2.528	0.01151	Male score significantly higher
To feel more confident about myself	3.127	0.001782	Female score significantly higher
To participate with my family or friends	9.569	< 2.2e-16	Female score significantly higher
To make myself feel whole	0.965	0.3346	NS
To reduce my chance of having a heart attack	-3.809	0.0001418	Male score significantly higher
To make myself more complete	-0.273	0.7852	NS
To improve my mood	3.671	0.0002447	Female score significantly higher
To improve my sense of self-worth	1.152	0.2496	NS
To share a group identity with other participants	5.033	5.057e-07	Female score significantly higher
It is a positive emotional experience	5.599	2.299e-08	Female score significantly higher
To feel proud of myself	5.571	2.698e-08	Female score significantly higher
To visit with friends	11.685	< 2.2e-16	Female score significantly higher
To feel a sense of achievement	5.674	1.493e-08	Female score significantly higher
To push myself beyond my current limit	2.456	0.01408	Female score significantly higher
To have time alone to sought things out	1.569	0.1167	NS
To say in physical condition	2.237	0.02534	Female score significantly higher
To concentrate on my thoughts	-1.182	0.2373	NS
To solve problems	0.563	0.5737	NS
To see how high I can place in my sport	-7.711	1.578e-14	Male score significantly higher
To feel a sense of belonging in nature	1.498	0.1341	NS
To stay physically attractive	0.576	0.5643	NS
To get a better performance than my friends	-10.622	< 2.2e-16	Male score significantly higher
To prevent illness	-0.534	0.5932	NS
People will look up to me	-3.956	7.745e-05	Male score significantly higher
To see if I can beat a certain performance	-8.217	2.816e-16	Male score significantly higher
To blow off steam	2.017	0.04382	Female score significantly higher
Brings me recognition	-5.695	1.323e-08	Male score significantly higher
To have time alone with the world	-1.561	0.1186	NS
To get away from it all	2.216	0.02677	Female score significantly higher
To make my body better than before	-2.256	0.02411	Male score significantly higher
To beat someone I’ve never beaten before	-7.536	5.978e-14	Male score significantly higher
To feel mentally in my control of my body	-2.538	0.0112	Male score significantly higher
To get compliments from others	-4.328	1.544e-05	Male score significantly higher
To feel at peace with the world	0.131	0.8961	NS
To feel like a winner	-2.610	0.009089	Male score significantly higher

From Table 1 there were similarities in the results for the 56 questions, with the same group of questions getting higher scores for males and females (and overall). The questions getting the highest ranking as motivational reasons behind competition at the Sydney WMG were “to compete with others”, “to improve my sporting performance”, “to socialize with other participants”, “to improve my health”, “to become more physically fit”, “to feel a sense of achievement”, “to push myself beyond my current limit” and “to say in physical condition”. The reasons for motivation “to meet people”, “to participate with my family or friends” and “it is a positive emotional experience” scored higher with females (mean Likert score above 5.0) than for males (mean Likert score below 5.0). From Table 2, it can be seen that female Likert scores for these motivations for competition were significantly (p <0.001) higher than for their male counterparts.

For males the questions that elicited the lowest response scores, as least motivating reasons behind competition were in order of ascending score (least relevant reason first): “to become less depressed”, “to have time alone with the world”, “to solve problems”, “to become less anxious”, “to get compliments from others”, “people will look up to me”. For females those questions eliciting the lowest scores were (in ascending order by score): “to have time alone with the world”, “to get a better performance than my friends”, “to get compliments from others”, “people will look up to me”, “to solve problems”, “brings me recognition” and “to become less depressed”. The psychological questions that scored lower for males also scored lower for females and vice versa, however there were differences as per Table 2, such as the question “to get a better performance than my friends”, which was significantly (p<0.0001) different with males rating the question higher on the Likert scale than females.

From Table 2, many of the questions demonstrated significantly higher importance as motivating factors when compared between the two genders. The questions: “to reduce my weight”, “to improve my sporting performance”, “to become less anxious”, “to improve my self-esteem”, “to prolong my life”, “to become less depressed”, “to distract myself from daily worries”, “to make my family and friends proud of me”, “to make myself feel whole”, “to make myself more complete”, “to improve my sense of self-worth”, “to have time alone to sought things out”, “to concentrate on my thoughts”, “to solve problems”, “to feel a sense of belonging in nature”, “to stay physically attractive”, “to prevent illness”, “to have time alone with the world” and “to feel at peace with the world”, were all not significantly (p>0.05) different when compared between the two genders.

DISCUSSION
Nineteen questions were not significantly (p>0.05) different when compared between the two genders. These nineteen questions, represented less than half of the 56 questions in the psychometric survey tool. Given so many individual questions demonstrated significantly different scoring for the two genders it is relevant in the context of the predictive modelling approaches based on the MOMS (66, 67) using gradient boosting (17) and ridge regression (33). In these papers (66, 67) the underlying factors linking the 56 questions were not used in their analysis and instead the raw 56 questions were used. This gave a higher accuracy at predicting gender than had been achieved in preceding research (25) using a multiplayer perceptron neural network (14). The finding that so many of the questions gave statistically significant differences for the two genders, gives further support to the logic behind this particular approach at using more questions for analysis as opposed to the overarching factors combining multiple questions.

From Table 1, as would be expected from past research findings on the MOMS at the Sydney WMG (21), the most motivation for the cohort as a whole was given by the item construct “to socialize with other participants”. For female masters athletes, this was the highest ranked item construct, with a mean Likert score of 5.960 out of 7. For males this construct also scored highly but was in fact the third highest ranked construct with “to become more physically fit” and “to improve my health” scoring higher. Females also scored highly on these other two constructs with scores which were in fact statistically significantly higher for both constructs than for males (as per Table 2). These findings would suggest as per previous research (21) that as “to socialize with other participants” was the highest scoring item construct, marketing endeavours to promote masters sport participation should focus on the socialising aspect of sport. As males scored highest on the construct “to become more physically fit”, therefore this construct would be the method of choice to targeted marketing initiatives addressed at males only, with “to improve my health” following as the second and “to socialize with other participants” as the third choice.

Amongst the lowest scoring item constructs was the construct “to have time alone with the world”, which scored a mean of 2.329 (standard deviation 1.756, male mean 2.372, female mean 2.285). This is logical as many masters competitors were competing in team events such as soccer, rugby union, softball, volleyball or touch football (a variation of touch rugby (65) that is one of the most popular sports in Australia and New Zealand (61)). In such team sports there would presumably be less time to be alone when training or competing than in marathon running (the environment under which the MOMS scale was originally designed (37)). The item constructs “to become less anxious” and “to become less depressed” demonstrated low mean scores compared to the majority of other constructs, both for the two genders combined (mean scores 2.461 and 2.399 on the seven-point Likert scale) as well as for males (means 2.454 and 2.371) and females (means 2.468 and 2.429) considered individually. These lower mean scores may be due to there only being a proportion of the masters cohort that suffered from anxiety or depression for whom these two questions were relevant, which may have resulted in a lower mean score across the cohort as a whole. This is confirmed in the literature (6), where 6.3% of the Sydney WMG cohort indicated they suffered from depression. It should be noted that based upon normative comparisons the incidence of depression was reported as high for Sydney’s 2009 WMG participants (6), though other masters cohorts have shown significantly less incidence of anxiety and depression than comparative data on the national population (8). Therefore, whilst only a small proportion of the cohort might find relevance in these two item constructs (depression and anxiety), for those who suffered from these disorders there may be a much higher degree of relevance and in turn the incidence in the Sydney WMG sample was considered as high compared to norms (6). It is accepted that exercise prescription has demonstrated benefits for mental health conditions such as depression (51). Of note, there was no significant difference detected via the Welch two sample t-test between the scores for males or females on these two item constructs (depression and anxiety), thought females did score both questions higher (though statistically non-significantly different). Therefore, no significant gender-based difference was apparent within this analysis confined to Likert scale mean scores.

In the literature (21), mental health constructs such as depression and anxiety were also demonstrated to be considered as not being important determinants of participation for WMG masters athletes. The alternative methodology in Heazlewood et al. (21) additionally identified the mental health constructs self-esteem, daily worries, improving mood and having a more purposeful life as not important determinants. These constructs had mean scores below the mean of all mean scores (3.717, approximated to three decimal places) of all 56 constructs measured. These scores (combined mean score by gender) were self-esteem (3.075), daily worries (3.294), improving mood (3.388) and having a more purposeful life (3.310).Whilst still scoring lower than the mean of the mean values calculated for the 56 other questions, females scored higher than males on all four of these mental health construct questions, this difference was larger enough to be statistically significant for the constructs “to improve my mood” (p<0.01) and “to make my life more purposeful” (p<0.0005). Whilst females scored higher than males in these mental health constructs in terms of their relevance for motivation behind participation at the WMG, as per the suggestion in Heazlewood et al. (21), it would be advised against marketing initiatives to promote participation in masters sports based on these mental health constructs as they may not be successful if utilised to promote participation, due to a low importance placed upon them by the majority of participants.

Whatman (68), indicated that in Australia (where the majority of competitors at the Sydney WMG were from (6)), health/fitness were major reasons behind participation in sport (>55% of respondents), followed to a lesser extent by enjoyment (22% of respondents). In our findings the construct “to improve my health” was one of the highest scoring constructs, for both males and females (though females scored significantly higher, p<0.01), with mean Likert score of 5.554 (both genders combined). Similarly, fitness was also identified as a major reason behind participation in line with the results reported by Whatman (68). Males and females (females significantly higher, p < 0.000001) both rated the construct “to become more physically fit” as one of the highest on the Likert scale (mean score for both genders combined 5.669). The MOMS scale does not have a question that directly translates to enjoyment, but a similar proxy would be “it is a positive emotional experience”, a construct that scored relatively highly for males and also females (though significantly higher for females, p < 0.0000001). It should be noted as per Heazlewood et al., 2011 (that applied an alternative assessment methodology) fitness constructs were rated more highly than weight control type constructs (e.g. “to control my weight” Likert mean 3.593 vs. “to become more physically fit” mean 5.669, numbers that in context of standard deviations are statistically significantly different, by inspection).

As the mean Likert score for weight control was statistically significantly lower than other constructs, the recommendation would be that to promote participation at masters events, marketing strategies should focus on other constructs. This is important to consider as research has shown associated positive outcomes in terms of obesity (53, 54, 60, 62, 63), reduced injury incidence and classification (9, 55, 9, 64) and reduced incidence of health-related diseases and some disorders (6-7, 10-13, 56-58) at the WMG. It would be recommended that constructs such as “to compete with others”, “to improve my sporting performance”, “to socialize with other participants”, “to improve my health”, “to become more physically fit”, “to feel a sense of achievement”, “to push myself beyond my current limit” and “to say in physical condition” would all provided a more targeted strategy.

CONCLUSIONS
For promotion of participation in masters sport and by inference physical activity at older ages, marketing initiatives should focus on such constructs as “to compete with others”, “to improve my sporting performance”, “to socialize with other participants”, “to improve my health”, “to become more physically fit”, “to feel a sense of achievement”, “to push myself beyond my current limit” and “to stay in physical condition”. The most motivation for the cohort as a whole was given by the item construct “to socialize with other participants”, though there were significant differences between the two genders. The weight control questions indicated these athletes did not place priority on this construct, thus focusing marketing initiatives on other constructs, such as for example weight control may be ineffective.

APPLICATIONS IN SPORT
In order to promote sport participation at older ages, focus should be placed on marketing the socialization aspects of sport. Though other constructs were also considered important to older athletes (such as competition, health and fitness), weight control was not considered an important construct, therefore marketing initiatives should avoid focusing on weight control as such a focus is likely to be ineffective for sport promotion.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Assistance was provided by the Sydney WMG Committee. We appreciate IT support from Evan Wills. We acknowledge the useful comments provided by the journal on review of the manuscript, with some beneficial additions included in the manuscript in response to reviewer suggestions. We would like to thank especially the Sydney WMG masters athletes who took the time to participate in this project.

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