What is AusPlay?

The Australian Sports Commission’s (ASC) task is to make Australian sport stronger. It is at the forefront of helping sports to succeed in a changing environment. This starts with evidence and research, identifying trends and opportunities within the sport sector.

In October 2015 the ASC commenced the AusPlay survey, a large-scale national survey to track the sporting behaviours and activities of the Australian population. It has been funded by the Australian Government until at least June 2026.

Key Features

Some of the key features of AusPlay are:

It is the largest and most comprehensive survey of its kind ever conducted in Australia with annual target sample sizes of 40,000 adults aged 15 and over and approximately 8,800 children aged 0-14.

The results from AusPlay will complement existing data and research the ASC has conducted in recent years, including the Future of Australian Sport, Market Segmentation studies and Community Perception Monitor.

AusPlay is a demonstration of the ASC's commitment to providing evidence-based insights that help the sector better understand the participation landscape and identify strategies to grow participation.

For the first time in an Australian public-sector funded survey, adults and children’s sport and physical recreation participation is collected through the same data collection instrument.

The data tracked by AusPlay will help the sector better understand how parent and child activity behaviours relate and their impact on sport participation.

It covers a large breadth and depth of topics including tracking participation behaviours and how active Australians are.

Purpose

The ASC is committed to providing robust data and sport market insights to help the sector better understand the participation landscape and identify strategies to grow participation. From late 2015, AusPlay became the single-source data currency for government and the sport sector that not only tracks Australian sport participation behaviours but also informs investment, policy and sport delivery by National Sporting Organisations (NSOs) and the sports network.

Objectives

The three main objectives of AusPlay are to:

Provide insights to help sports grow participation and track trends.

Provide data that informs government investment, policy and program delivery.

Identify and describe links between sport participation and other influential factors.

History

Since 2001 many government initiatives have adopted sport and physical recreation participation estimates as a performance indicator. These estimates were generated by the Exercise, Recreation and Sport Survey (ERASS) from 2001-10, and then the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) from 2011-14. However, in June 2014 the ABS announced their cessation of funding for all sport and recreation data collection. This created a major gap in national sport and physical recreation data which the ASC filled through AusPlay.

The ASC conducted an open tender process for AusPlay in late 2014 through 2015 which resulted in Big Village (formerly ORC International/ENGINE) being appointed to deliver AusPlay. Following the tender process the ASC embarked on an extensive consultation and survey design process. Data collection via computer assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) commenced on 22 October 2015 and first results were publicly released on 8 December 2016.

AusPlay continued as a CATI survey for almost eight years until this methodology became unsustainable. Following another tender process in late 2022 through early 2023, the ASC appointed ORIMA Research to transition AusPlay to online data collection. The ASC followed an extensive process to maximise the quality and interpretability of the AusPlay data across this major methodological transition. CATI ceased in June 2023 and online data collection commenced in July 2023. First results from the new online methodology were publicly released on 31 October 2024.

The methodology change introduced a break in the AusPlay time series. Results from 2023-24 onwards cannot be directly compared with historical 2015-23 figures for trend analysis.