Youth serving sport-for-development

Abstract

Sport-for-development (SfD) signifies the intentional use of sport or play that aims to achieve development or peace-related outcomes. Well-designed SfD initiatives are widely considered practical and cost-effective tools capable of achieving specific outcomes on individual-, community-, or systems-levels. Despite the many purported benefits of these initiatives, there is to date no clear consensus on what it means for a SfD program to be "well-designed" in a way that facilitates specified outcomes achievement. SfD scholars have coined this the lack of evidence discourse. To negate this discourse, scholars call for SfD practitioners to be specific about what their initiatives aim to achieve and prioritize evaluation capacity and practice. My dissertation responds to these calls by examining evaluation capacities and outcomes development processes among youth-serving SfD nonprofit organizations (NPOs) based in the United States. To do this, I used a mixed-methods concurrent triangulation research design across three studies and employed evaluation capacity building, positive youth development, and population health theoretical lenses.Studies 1 and 2 addressed the lack of evidence discourse by examining SfD leader perceptions of evaluation capacities within their domestic, youth-serving SfD NPO. In Study 1, I utilized a quantitative research design to survey 88 leaders, examining the relationship between their individually held satisfaction with evaluation practice and perceptions of organizational evaluation capacities on individual, organizational, and systems-levels. Using ordinal logistic regression, I found that capacity-related factors on the individual-level, specifically attitudes held towards evaluation and skill-level to complete routine evaluation task were associated with increased level of evaluation satisfaction. I found a similar relationship with organizational-level factors, including partnerships for evaluation, having an internal evaluator role, tools for evaluation, and time to conduct evaluation. Factors on the systems-level were not significantly association with evaluation satisfaction. All findings held true regardless of organizational budget. In Study 2 and 3, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 SfD leaders who participated in Study 1. Study 2 examined practitioner perceptions of evaluation capacity and practice in the domestic, youth-serving SfD landscape. Aligning with evaluation capacity frameworks, results indicated that SfD practitioners largely perceived that evaluation was a meaningful and worthwhile endeavor, although motivations to engage in evaluation varied across organizations. Several factors were perceived by leaders to facilitate (dedicated resources for evaluation, partnership support) or hinder (lack of dedicated resources, lack of human resources, lack of an evaluation plan) evaluation practice in their program setting. As in Study 1, partnerships were perceived to facilitate evaluation practice in several ways, for example by providing increase staff capacity or skills, tools necessary to conduct evaluation, or evaluation planning. This study also examined evaluation satisfaction among program leaders. Most often, lower levels of evaluation satisfaction were attributed to lower levels of evaluation capacity within the organization. Guided by organizational and evaluation capacity building lenses, implications for how SfD NPOs can prioritize capacity building initiatives that aim to support evaluation practice are discussed. In Study 3, I examined outcomes evaluation practices, outcomes development processes, and the role of organizational stakeholders and beneficiaries in determining program outcomes among SfD NPOs. I found that program outcomes were often informally established at the initiation of programming and grew to become formally established as the program evolved. Most often, organizational leaders were exclusively involved in setting or evolving program outcomes. Leaders who reported incorporating youth voice into outcomes development processes, although not routine practice across all organizations, attributed the role of youth to establishing outcomes that fit the developmental context and lived experiences of youth participants. Overall, I found that domestic, youth-serving SfD NPOs overwhelmingly struggle to establish outcomes at the start of programming, suggesting that organizational capacity may play a role in outcomes development processes as many reported having very little resources at the initiation of programming. Using a Positive Youth Development lens, this study concluded that youth voice can and should be included in the outcomes development process to ensure that outcomes established for evaluation practice are meaningful to the program and youth in their contexts. Taken together, the studies in this dissertation provide greater understanding into evaluation capacity and practices among domestic, youth-serving SfD NPOs. Recommendations are provided to support SfD practitioners in mobilizing program evaluation in a way that allows sport to be a powerful tool that can promote health and ultimately work to dissolve the health-equity gap that disproportionally impacts some populations. --Author's abstract