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Abstract
In this paper we use a social practice approach to explore men's experience of Football Fans in Training (FFIT), a group‐based weight management programme for men that harnesses men's symbolic attachment to professional football clubs to engage them in lifestyle change. FFIT is delivered by community coaches in clubs’ stadia and is gender‐sensitised in relation to context, content and style of delivery. Using a ‘toolkit’ of concepts from the work of Bourdieu, Goffman and Durkheim we analysed data from 13 focus group discussions with participants, and fieldwork notes from programme observations to investigate the appeal and success of FFIT, and how it worked to support change. Our analysis builds on our work on the importance of shared symbolic commitment to the football club and being with ‘men like me’ to understand how the interaction context facilitated ‘effervescent’ experiences. These experiences encouraged men to make changes to their diet and physical activity, talk about them, practice performing them and implement them in their lives. Thus a social practice approach illuminated the social processes through which lifestyle change was achieved, and we argue that it can deepen and enrich both intervention design and evaluation.
Highlights
Scrutiny of various ‘health behaviours’ has intensified in recent years as public health researchers and practitioners have sought to intervene to change them
As many of the behaviours which contribute to weight gain and weight management are related to gender, the obesity ‘epidemic’ poses some different challenges for men’s and women’s health; in this paper we focus on men
In Bourdieuian terms, we suggest that they recognised aspects of shared habitus; a similar set of accumulated experiences of supporting the same football club, of body, of age, of gender, which men recognised through the kinds of conversations and actions that were generated in the group interactions that took place during Football Fans in Training (FFIT)
Summary
Scrutiny of various ‘health behaviours’ has intensified in recent years as public health researchers and practitioners have sought to intervene to change them. Despite recent advances in behavioural theory and in specifying behaviour change techniques in intervention development (Michie et al 2013), sociological thought is seldom integrated. Everyday behaviours such as the consumption of food and drink, engagement in physical activity and time spent sedentary are all practical and cultural phenomena that simultaneously reflect our positions in social space (Bourdieu 1984), and influence our body shape, morphology and function, and so. There is an ongoing challenge for social and behavioural scientists to more comprehensively integrate multidisciplinary perspectives on the practices and theories of health behaviour change, and for sociologists of health and illness (Cohn 2014), who seek to understand the social conditions which facilitate, inhibit or prevent particular health practices. The challenge, as we see it, is for sociologists to contribute understandings of how social practices are made and re-made in interactions, and how these practices become established as ‘tacit knowledge’, namely, as behaviours that are largely accepted, and seldom confronted or challenged
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