langcliffe
Well-known member
mrodoc said:If you just underground for the fun of it you are going to get bored pretty quickly.
I must have a high boredom threshold - having fun has been my main motivation for caving for 53 years.
mrodoc said:If you just underground for the fun of it you are going to get bored pretty quickly.
mrodoc said:I bet you do more than go down caves otherwise you would not be posting on this forum!
Rachel said:It's worth considering that BCA membership stats only tell part of the story. There are plenty of young people caving seperately from clubs, who don't appear in the statistics. I'm pottering down Great Douk this afternoon with a work colleague and her six year old son. Neither are, or are ever likely to be, BCA members. I'm sure there must be many other trips like this, with kids going on trips but never showing up on the BCA radar.
mikem said:Interestingly, whilst the effect of covid on BCA membership numbers will only now be being discovered (as clubs should have sent in returns) & the BMC have lost c.10% of their members, British Canoeing have seen a nearer 20% increase. (The actual numbers involved are quite similar, as BMC was half as big again as BC, but both are over 10 times the size of BCA).
Although, as I noted elsewhere, if you consider that under 18s make up 20% of the UK population & are effectively excluded from joining clubs without their parents, the average age of the remaining general population does move up from around 40 to 50 years old (in 1975 the general average was 36 (median 34) & in 2019 it was 40 (median similar), so increased by about 1 year every 10 - but you'd need to know the number of children born at those periods to find out how much of that is due to people living longer). However, ages cannot easily be compared between years in BCA data, as undoubtedly more new members are likely to supply it than those who have been here long term & they are likely to be younger than the average...However reliable data, with date collected cited starts appearing in 2009 (of which it was 5609), in 2014 this was 6094 and last year stood at 7075.
Context is critical here ? sustained general growth may be more a marker of clubs needing insurance, which may reflect a rapidly growing need in liability cover over the last 2 decades (the BCA?s own scheme was increased from ?5 to ?10 million in cover). It also may be a marker of the University sector stabilising and the baby boomer generation shifting up the pyramid. There is a significant generation of the membership between the ages of 50 and 65. This is also reflected in the fact that when you correct for the general population pyramid we are still dramatically over represented in this demographic.
nearlywhite said:Badlad said:Rostam - you've got a lot of feedback already on your OP. Isn't that what you asked for?
A lot of discussion about things not in the report. What would be more useful would be a critique of it: what have you taken away from it? What would be a more helpful way to present the data? Are there issues with the format etc?
The problem is is that I already know your feedback (this report is promoted by one of your conclusions), and Josh's unsurprisingly
It'd be also good to hear from people who go 'oh that's not been my experience' when they look at the data to see if there are subtle regional/community variations and where might need more support.
pwhole said:and I would also guess that most of them aren't members of BCA.
mikem said:But yes there probably are more mine explorers who aren't in clubs than there are cavers.