A Longitudinal Study on the Relationship between Physical Education and Social Health

This study aimed to examine whether school physical education (PE) promotes students’ social health using a longitudinal design. To this end, data from 1979 students from a 4th grade cohort, established by the Korean Children and Youth Panel Survey with data collected from 2010 to 2016, who participated in all of the 7th grade (2013), 8th grade (2014), and 9th grade (2015) surveys were analyzed. We used autoregressive cross-lagged structural equation modeling conducted with AMOS 23.0 to examine the longitudinal causality among the factors. The following results were obtained. First, there was reciprocal causation between PE and social health (PE→SR, β = 0.099, β = 0.100; SR→PE; β = 0.207, β = 0.226). Second, PE did not influence sense of community, whereas the latter had a negative effect on PE (β = −0.078, β = −0.077). Third, social relationships influenced the sense of community (β = 0.248, β = 0.266). Based on these findings, we suggest the need for a system that enables students to frequently monitor their performance. This includes implementing a program to improve social relationships to enhance the quality of PE participation, designing programs that foster a sense of community in PE in Korean middle schools, and structuring PE programs that consider the hierarchy between social relationships and a sense of community.