Sports activities for undergraduate students in Saudi Arabia Universities: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Objectives: Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has experienced tremendous economic growth in the past few years and this in turn has led to undesirable lifestyle behaviors coupled with an associated rise in non-communicable diseases. This has forced the KSA administration to encourage sports related activities for a healthy life style. In this article, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is presented to discuss the current state of Physical Activity (PA) and sports activities in KSA and Other Countries in the World (OCW). The article also presents issues that hinder the success of physical and sports activities development in KSA to identify research gap. Methods: SLR search was conducted using ScienceDirect, Springer, Journal of health sciences and Google Scholar databases. The databases electronic search produced 553 articles at the initial stage. Some of these articles were eliminated since they did not conform to inclusion criteria. Finally a total of 58 articles satisfied the condition and were included for the study. Results: The literature highlighted that the studies investigating the male respondents is quite low having 3 in KSA and 0 in OCW, as against 7 in KSA and 0 in OCW for Females. In addition, the empirical analyses of the result based on this SLR concluded that the sports related studies in KSA are very low as compared to OCW. The study revealed that the main factors that hinder the success of physical and sports activities in KSA universities among males are lack of energy, motivation, self-confidence, and time, while among females, they are lack of social support and resources. Conclusion: It is not encouraged to participate in sports activity in Saudi Arabia. Despite the protests to promote sports activities there is very little action in this area as compared to OCW. Therefore, further research is needed to realize the potential in this area KSA to realise the vision 2030 and goal.