Reaching hard to reach youth: Who are the inactive youth?

Despite growing knowledge emphasizing benefits of physical activity, the inactivity rate in youth seems to remain. The present study suggests that one reason for this is lack of knowledge about the inactive and that exploration of differences in every daily life-challenges of inactive and active youth are needed. Applying multivariate analysis of variance and classification and regression tree analysis, differences between the two groups were seen. Results show associations between demographic variables and inactivity, yet when adding psycho-social variables, the accuracy improved significantly. The results suggest that inactive youth seem to live more challenging lives compared to their active peers. When we feed statistical analyses with only demographic data such as age, gender, social class and ethnicity, we may fail to examine the role of important psycho-social variables and thus miss beneficial knowledge about inactive youth and a pedagogical potential for developing appropriate interventions.