Looking Back and Looking Around: How Athletes, Parents and Coaches See Psychosocial Development in Adolescent Performance Sport

Sport has the potential to support psychosocial development in young people. However, extant studies have tended to evaluate purpose-built interventions, leaving regular organised sport relatively overlooked. Moreover, previous work has tended to concentrated on a narrow range of outcomes. To addres...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSports (Basel) Vol. 10; no. 4; p. 47
Main Authors Lara-Bercial, Sergio, McKenna, Jim
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Switzerland MDPI AG 22.03.2022
MDPI
Subjects
Cognitive ability
COVID-19
Intervention
life skills
Ontology
Personal development
positive youth development
Psychologists
Psychosocial development
realist evaluation
Researchers
youth sport
life skills
personal development
positive youth development
psychosocial development
youth sport
realist evaluation
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Summary:Sport has the potential to support psychosocial development in young people. However, extant studies have tended to evaluate purpose-built interventions, leaving regular organised sport relatively overlooked. Moreover, previous work has tended to concentrated on a narrow range of outcomes. To address these gaps, we conducted a season-long ethnography of a youth performance sport club based on a novel Realist Evaluation approach. We construed the club as a social intervention within a complex system of agents and structures. The results are published in this special issue as a two-part series. In this first paper, we detail the perceptions of former and current club parents, players and coaches, using them to build a set of programme theories. The resulting network of outcomes (i.e., self, emotional, social, moral and cognitive) and generative mechanisms (i.e., the attention factory, the greenhouse for growth, the personal boost and the real-life simulator), spanning across multiple contextual layers, provides a nuanced understanding of stakeholders' views and experiences. This textured perspective of the multi-faceted process of development provides new insights for administrators, coaches and parents to maximise the developmental properties of youth sport, and signposts new avenues for research in this area.
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ISSN:2075-4663
2075-4663
DOI:10.3390/SPORTS10040047