Looking Back and Looking Around: How Athletes, Parents and Coaches See Psychosocial Development in Adolescent Performance Sport (original) (raw)
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2022
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 [1]. We construed the club as a social intervention within a complex system of agents and structures. In this-Part 1-account 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 multifaceted 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.
2022
Part 1 of this 2-paper series identified a wide and deep network of context, generative mechanisms and outcomes responsible for psychosocial development in a performance basketball club. In this-part 2-study, the stakeholder's programme theories were tested during a full-season ethnography of the same club. The findings confirm the highly individualised nature of each young person's journey. Methodologically, immersion in the day-today environment generated a finegrain analysis of the processes involved, including: i) sustained attentional focus; ii) structured and unstructured skill building activities; iii) deliberate and incidental support; and iv) feelings indicating personal growth. Personal development in and through sport is thus shown to be conditional, multi-faceted, time-sensitive and idiosyncratic. The findings of this two-part study are considered to propose a model of psychosocial development in and through sport. This heuristic tool is presented to support sport psychologists, coaches, club administrators and parents to deliberately create and optimise developmental environments.
International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 2012
As the literature is far from being unanimous in regards to the psychosocial benefits of sports practice, we conducted a preliminary qualitative study with nine teenagers who participated in a group sporting challenge to better understand: (1) youths’ perceptions regarding the program’s most important dimensions and (2) its effects in the physical, psychological and social spheres of their life. Following these results, we highlighted six driving principles we consider to be significant to interventions involving sports as a tool for psychosocial development: (1) cooperation amongst youth; (2) facilitators’ discipline, direct involvement and positive attitude; (3) moving the youths beyond their physical, psychological and social comfort zones; (4) the interplay between enjoyment and effort; (5) constant innovation in training content; (6) risk as a driving force for cohesion and social ties.
The Experiences of Being a Talented Youth Athlete: Lessons for Parents
Involvement in organized sport can be highly demanding for young athletes who encounter many difficult situations and stressors. This can be exacerbated among youth athletes who have been recruited into talent-identification youth sport programs. Given that there are a range of negative consequences that can result when talent-identified (TI) youth athletes are unable to cope with the stressors they encounter, additional support is therefore necessary. Parents are uniquely situated to assist in this regard, but they are not always equipped to provide optimal levels of support. Therefore, the aim of this study was to understand the experiences of being a TI youth athlete and present the findings as “lessons” for parents seeking to enhance their involvement in TI youth sport settings. This article reports on qualitative data collected from the 1st year of a 3-year longitudinal study involving TI youth athletes from South Australia. Fifty male athletes (M age = 14.6 years) participated in focus groups to hear their experiences of being a TI youth athlete and understand what difficulties they want their parents to know. From the thematic analysis, 3 major themes were identified from the focus groups with TI youth athletes: (a) difficulties with being talented, (b) negotiating the future, and (c) playing for improvement. From the findings, a number of lessons for parents and youth sport organizations are offered to assist the transmission of knowledge to an applied setting.
Youth athletes' developmental outcomes by age, gender, and type of sport
Journal of Human Sport and Exercise, 2020
The purpose of this study was to examine the athletes' perceived developmental outcomes of competence, confidence, connection and character (the 4 Cs) in a competitive youth sport context with respect to age groups (12-14 vs 15-18-year-old), gender (girls and boys) and sport type (individual vs. team). Participants were 314 athletes (173 girls, 141 boys) and 31 coaches (5 Women, 26 Men) from artistic gymnastics, basketball, football, swimming, tennis, track and field, and volleyball. Data were collected by the adapted and validated form of Positive Youth Development Measurement Toolkit. According to the findings, older group of athletes (15-18 years of age) had lower scores than their younger counterparts (12-14 years of age) in all of the developmental outcomes. Girls scored lower in competence outcome, while boys had lower scores in connection and character outcomes. Moreover, team sport athletes had lower scores in competence outcome (p < .05). The findings were discussed with the extant literature, and programmatic suggestions for future studies were provided.