The Influence of Age and Gender on the Value Orientation of Extreme Sports Participants

Research has shown that the popularity of extreme sports is on the rise in Hungary just as in developed countries. While we cannot question the influence of the press, it is very likely that shifts and changes in the value orientation of a society also play an important role in fostering the process. In the first stage of the present study, the value orientation of a group of Hungarian people involved in action sports is mapped where the values are arranged into a latent structure using principal component analysis. In the second stage of research, it is checked whether the examined group is a homogenous community regarding their value orientations, and researchers examine if two variables - age and gender - significantly influence the value orientations of the respondents. Our conclusion is that there is little difference between group members regarding their high preferences for community values and the low preferences for traditional values, but age and gender significantly influence respondents’ attitudes to post-materialist values and partially those to materialist values. Younger participants report higher preferences for both materialist and postmaterialist values, while females attribute higher importance to post-materialist values.