Lara-Bercial, S.; McKenna, J. Looking Back and Looking Around: How Athletes, Parents and Coaches See Psychosocial Development in Adolescent Performance Sport. Sports2022, 10, 47.
Lara-Bercial, S.; McKenna, J. Looking Back and Looking Around: How Athletes, Parents and Coaches See Psychosocial Development in Adolescent Performance Sport. Sports 2022, 10, 47.
Lara-Bercial, S.; McKenna, J. Looking Back and Looking Around: How Athletes, Parents and Coaches See Psychosocial Development in Adolescent Performance Sport. Sports2022, 10, 47.
Lara-Bercial, S.; McKenna, J. Looking Back and Looking Around: How Athletes, Parents and Coaches See Psychosocial Development in Adolescent Performance Sport. Sports 2022, 10, 47.
Abstract
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 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.
Keywords
Positive youth development, youth sport, realist evaluation, life skills, personal development, psychosocial development.
Subject
Social Sciences, Psychology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
