Motivos para a participação nas aulas de educação física segundo adolescentes do ensino fundamental.

The aims consist in to describe the reasons for participating in school physical education classes for adolescents between the sixth and ninth grade of elementary school and to compare the occurrence of reasons between genders. This is descriptive research, carried out with 71 adolescents with an average age of 13 years, 27 girls and 44 boys in a school in southern Brazil. To assess the reasons, a diagnosis was made with two open questions. The responses were summarized in categories according to the content analysis. Afterward, they were transformed into 3 quantitative dummy variables. A descriptive analysis of occurrences was carried out and the prevalence ratio between genders was calculated. The results suggest that the individual reasons were diverse, the adolescents believe that physical education is "legal", important for the body, for aesthetics, for health, wellbeing, for playing, for playing games, for having sports, for dancing, physical exercises, for enjoying outdoor activities. The comparison between sexes points out that there is only 18% of girls versus 47% of boys (PR: 0.248; p = 0.016) who adhere due to physical exercise and sport, and 44% of girls versus 20% of boys reported physical fitness and health (PR: 3.111; p = 0.035). It is concluded that adolescents have several reasons for participating in physical education. Sport and physical exercise are reasons described by boys. Girls indicated a higher occurrence of reasons in physical fitness and health category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]