The impact of physical exercise participation on residents' sense of social justice: an empirical analysis based on the 2023 data of China's CGSS.

Residents in the sample reported a moderately above-midpoint sense of social justice, and just over half evaluated societal fairness positively.

• The analytic sample comprised 5,364 respondents from CGSS 2023 after excluding missing, abnormal, and out-of-range observations.
• The average sense of social justice score was 3.30, above the medium threshold.
• 52.49% of respondents held positive evaluations of societal fairness.

Slightly more than half of respondents participated in physical exercise.

• The sample-wide physical exercise participation rate was 57.11%.
• Data came from the nationwide 2023 Chinese General Social Survey.

Physical exercise participation was significantly and positively associated with sense of social justice after adjusting for controls.

• Multiple linear regression controlled for demographic, socioeconomic, health, and social capital indicators.
• The abstract reports a significant positive correlation after accounting for all control variables.

Exercise participation was positively associated with self-rated physical health and with social trust.

• Associations remained significant after accounting for all control variables.
• These were the first-stage links in the mediation models.

Both self-rated physical health and social trust were positively associated with sense of social justice.

• The relationships held in models including control covariates.
• They support the roles of health and trust as candidate mediators.

Bootstrap-tested SEM identified two independent mediating pathways and one serial mediating chain linking exercise to sense of social justice.

• Independent pathways: exercise → self-rated physical health → social justice, and exercise → social trust → social justice.
• Serial chain: exercise → self-rated physical health → social trust → sense of social justice.
• Bootstrap tests confirmed all three indirect pathways.

The authors conclude that physical health and social trust may help explain the exercise–social justice association, but the cross-sectional design limits the findings to associations.

• The data are cross-sectional, so relationships should be interpreted as associations rather than causal effects.
• Mediation is described as 'correlated mediating' linkages, i.e., statistical rather than causal mediation.
• The authors suggest considering physical well-being and social trust alongside public fitness participation when seeking to understand fairness perceptions.