Abstract
Sports participation has the potential to contribute to young people’s health. A prerequisite for young people to benefit from sports is that they stay in sports. Studies that consider both personal and contextual factors are needed to unpack the broader health-promoting potential of youth sports. The purpose of the study is to contribute to knowledge about the health-promoting potential of young people’s participation in organized sports by exploring youth perspectives on what makes a sports club health-promoting with a focus on health resources that young people consider important for sports club participation. For this cross-sectional study a brief survey was conducted with 15–16 year old students (n = 123) at two schools in Sweden, asking three open-ended questions about their participation in sports. The study used a salutogenic theory-driven analysis in combination with statistical analysis. Five health resources that young people consider important for sports club participation are revealed. On an individual, more ‘swimmer’-related level, these are personal well-being and social relations, including relationally meaningful activities, and on an organizational level, relating to the ‘river’, that sports clubs offer a supportive and well-functioning environment. For sports clubs to be health-promoting settings for young people and thus hopefully to reduce drop-out, we need a more sustainable approach emphasizing drop-in, drop-through, and drop-over as a continuous iterative process. We also need to consider the complexity of sports participation for young people, involving individual, organizational and environmental issues.
Highlights
The health benefits for young people of physical activity are irrefutable [1]
The first part is on sport participation and organized sport, but since there sometimes is no clear cut between different types of organization of sport, and that knowledge from different types of organization could give valuable insights the part could include a mix
The questions (a–d), inspired by salutogenic theory in the sense that we focus on both young people’s participation in organized sports and the characteristics of the sports clubs where the young people participate, correspond to elements related to the swimmer and to the river, as well as to the relation between the two [57]
Summary
The health benefits for young people of physical activity are irrefutable [1]. Participating in sports has the potential to contribute to young people’s health by increasing their physical activity [2,3] and their mental and social health, as well as developing life skills related to well-being outcomes [4,5]. Participation in club-organized sports often peaks at around 11–13 years of age before declining throughout adolescence [2,7,8] These unambiguous benefits of sports participation can, be questioned from a health-promotion perspective. There is plenty of research on young people’s participation in sports, examining such things as who participates (or does not), why they join, how they benefit, why they remain and why they drop out These studies use different disciplinary perspectives, such as psychology, focusing for example on individual motives (e.g., [13]); sociology, focusing on organizational or policy aspects (e.g., [14]); pedagogy, focusing on learning as both a motivation and an outcome (e.g., [15]); as well as physiology, focusing on physical health benefits (e.g., [2]). We present how a salutogenic settings-based approach helps us further explore the health-promoting potential of sports clubs
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