etude des aptitudes, des motivations, des profils socio ... - snpsc

Simplified plan
Methods to collect data (public data, survey)
Who are those who practise speleology ? (numbers, age, sex, occupation and
geographical breakdown of numbers)
Modes and places of practice
Crosschecking of the data of the survey
Conclusion : profiles of those who practise
Appendix
Summary
The data on which we have drawn up this chapter come from three main sources : public
data, an extract from the computer file of the members of the French Federation of Speleology
(FFS) and a survey held among 285 federates.
We must underline the importance of the practice out of the federation, as well as the
difficulty in winning the loyalty of the new members. The numbers of the federation have been
regularly increasing for a century, and France holds an important rank as far as the numbers of
practising people are concerned. Like many other federations of activities in the natural world,
federate speleologists are mostly males. The adherents' average age is superior to 30. Like
most sportsmen, speleologists are especially recruited among well-to-do or middle classes, with
a fairly high academic standard. The geographical breakdown of speleologists, with the help of
an analysis as the main component of five variables, accounts for an inconsistency : on the one
hand, they are on the increase just now, in the vicinity of caves that are remote from towns ; on
the other hand, the statistical analysis confirms a typical piece of given information : the
speleologist, just like the sportsman, is, above all, a townsman. In this geographical breakdown,
there is a distinctive feature proper to speleologists, in comparison with sportsmen, taken as a
body, which a deeper study could extend to a few other activities in the natural world. The
increase of the federates' number is to be ascribed more to the expansion of rural speleology
than to town recruitment.
The study of the places of origin compared with the places of practice confirms that
speleologists are going through a transitional phase. The big urban teams which have promoted