Dirección económica y márketing de servicios de actividad física para personas mayores

Zusammenfassung

Older people (people aged above 65 years) are the demographical group that is growing faster in the World. Besides, Spain is already one of the countries with the highest ageing rate in Europe and even some estimates indicate that in 2050 it will be the country with the second oldest population. The physiological, psychical and social benefits that physical activity provides to health and life quality of older people have been proved through several investigations and publications. At the same time, the practice of physical activity by senior population also provides important benefits to society (in terms of reduction of health and social costs). Nevertheless, despite these individual and social benefits, the elderly still are the demographical group with the lowest rate of practice of physical activity. Previous investigations indicate that the price of exercising can be a barrier that prevents older people from including physical activity in their lifestyle. The main goal of this research is to advance in the knowledge of the characteristics of the expenditure in physical activity and how the price acts as a barrier for the elderly to practice physical activity in Spain, in order to improve the decisions of the marketing and economic management of organizations that provide physical activity services to older people. This research has been developed within the I+D+i DEP2005-00161-C03-00 coordinated project “Incidence of the aging population in the facilities, sport management, and barriers for sport for all practice by elderly people in Spain”. And this project has been done in accordance with the lines of investigation of the 2004-007 Science Investigation, Development and Technological Innovation National Plan. The statistical data used in the research have been obtained through the analysis of a written questionnaire applied to a random representative sample of the elderly population in Spain (people aged above 65 years). The size of the sample has been of 933 people, for a confidence interval of 95.5% and an error of +-3.27%. And a probabilistic multi-stage sampling procedure has been used. As a conclusion of this research, older people’s demand of physical activity in Spain can be divided in three types: firstly, those that exercise weekly (17.4%) are the current demand; secondly, those that do not do physical activity, but are interested in starting to practice it, constitute the latent demand (12.8%); and thirdly, those that neither practice nor are interested in doing physical activity and compose the nonexistent demand (69.9%). The results of this research also confirm that there is a significant relation between these three segments of demand and the demographic, social and economic variables, except for the gender variable. With regard to the expenditure in the practice of physical activity of the current demand, it can be concluded that the average expense is 8.75€ per month (this figure includes those people that do not spend anything (52.5%), people that spend from 1€ to 15€ per month (19.5%), people that spend between 15€ and 30€ per month (22.6%) and those that spend more than 30€ per month (5.7%). In addition, results confirm that there is a significant relation between the monthly expenditure in physical activity of the current demand and the demographic, socioeconomic and organizational variables, except for the variables of gender, age, educational level, income and social class. The high cost of practicing physical activity in Spain is a barrier that prevents 25% of the latent demand from exercising. There is not a significant relation between the barrier of price and the demographic, socioeconomic and organizational variables, except for the educational level, that has shown a significant and moderate relation with price. The analysis of the expectations of monthly expenditure of the latent demand in Spain has shown that 42% could not be able or would not be willing to spend money in the practice of physical activity; 25.2% would spend from 1€ to 15€ per month; 31.1% would spend between 15€ and 30€ per month and 1.7% would be willing to spend more than 30€ per month. Therefore, the average expenditure of the latent demand would be 12.1€ per month. It hasn’t been found a significant relation between the expectations of monthly expenditure and the studied variables, except for the demographic variable, marital status and type of organization. There is also a moderate relation between the expectations of monthly expenditure and the perception of the high price of practicing physical activity as a barrier. Finally, for those that neither practice nor are interested in doing physical activity and compose the nonexistent demand of the research, 17.8% considered that the high price of practicing physical activity hindered them from exercising weekly. The results of the research also show that there is not a significant relation between the price factor in the nonexistent demand and the demographic and socioeconomic variables, except for the demographic size. However, due to the shortage of previous research in this area it would be necessary to continue investigating to confirm these results.