Sports-based interventions for socially vulnerable youth: Towards well-defined interventions with easy-to-follow outcomes?

Introduction

The concept of social vulnerability broadly refers to the distorted relations of young people with institutions of society, such as family, school, labour market, healthcare and justice (Vettenburg, 1998). Central within the concept is the progressive accumulation of negative experiences with such institutions, which eventually amount into social disconnectedness. Stigmatisation, discrimination, sanctioning and the self-perception of incompetence due to low ambitions and lack of achieved ‘success’, are often the net results for youth with a higher degree of social vulnerability (Vettenburg, 1998). In light of the concept of social vulnerability, sports-based interventions are viewed as a way to alleviate the distorted relationships of youth, and the outcomes they produce (Haudenhuyse et al., 2012).

A vast amount of literature can be found reporting on the association of organised youth sports with a range of positive health-related, educational and social outcomes (see Coalter, 2005; Fraser-Thomas et al., 2005; Gould and Carson, 2008; Holt, 2008). Specifically, in relation to socially vulnerable youth, sports are viewed as an opportunity to actively engage young people in a leisure context and not just in terms of participation in sports activities, but across a range of issues including education, employment and training, community leadership and healthy lifestyles. For example, in a British cohort study, Feinstein et al. (2005) found that for vulnerable groups, sports club attendance at age 16 reduced the chances of social exclusion outcomes during adulthood (age 30). In addition, it has been argued that wider benefits accruing from organised sports involvement are stronger for disadvantaged youth with social, academic deficits and families residing in high-risk neighbourhoods (Feinstein et al., 2005; Mahoney et al., 2005). Such instrumental views on sports are, however, not new, as there is long history of viewing sports, as part of a physical education curriculum, to achieve a variety of outcomes relating to the individual or the wider community (Bailey et al., 2009). What is more, sports are increasingly being used by a variety of organisations and services that are not traditionally linked to providing sport activities, such as youth work organisations, community and welfare services (Theeboom et al., 2010). The main reason why such organisations and services have started to use sports from a social and developmental perspective – often with regard to specific target groups – might be related to the fact that sports attract many young people. For example, sports participation data from Flanders have shown that almost three out of four youngsters between the ages of 10 and 17 are involved in at least one sport (Scheerder et al., 2011). These figures illustrate that sport is a highly accessible activity that allows large numbers of youngsters to become involved. Moreover, it has been indicated that in comparison to other socio-cultural practices (for example, youth movements, youth centres, youth out-reach practices), sports-based practices seem to be more capable in attracting young people independently of their socio-economic background (Feinstein et al., 2005; Vanhoutte, 2007) and seem to provide rich contexts for reaching so-called harder-to-reach youth (Crabbé, 2007; Feinstein et al., 2007; Spaaij, 2009). In other words, sport presents a very powerful tool for engaging socially vulnerable young people in an organised context, which offers an opportunity to work with them. Reaching socially vulnerable young people constitutes the first necessary step for working with them towards broader developmental and social outcomes. Evidently, this first step is, however, not sufficient for creating positive health-related, educational or social outcomes. From a more general perspective and related to working with young people in a sports setting towards positive youth developmental outcomes, Coakley (2011: 310) stated that sport participation must occur in settings where young people are physically safe, personally valued, morally and economically supported, personally and politically empowered and hopeful about the future.

Intellectual clarity

Coalter (2011) has argued that sports-based social interventions are mostly guided by inflated promises and lack of conceptual clarity. It is often not clear why it is assumed that participation in particular sports programmes can have certain impacts on people participating in them (Coalter, 2011). In this context, sports-based social interventions have been described as ill-defined interventions with hard-to-follow outcomes (Coalter, 2007 with reference to Pawson, 2003), relating to the fact that the added value of such sports programmes is often formulated in imprecise terms, which reduces the ability to evaluate the effectiveness of these programmes. In relation to youth programmes in general, it has been argued that existing evaluation practices have done little to differentiate what processes or experiences within youth-based activities are related to positive changes (Hansen et al., 2003). This has lead researchers to refer to such practices as black or magical boxes (see Coalter, 2007), since little is known about the ways programmes are actually working in relation to their claimed but often hard-to-follow (sometimes magical) outcomes.

There seems to be a growing body of literature in the domain of sports research, underlining the view that sports-based social practices need to be more clearly conceptualised in terms of inputs (the used human, social, physical, cultural, political, economical resources), throughputs (what is being done with used resources and how it is done), outputs (what is being accomplished with used resources) and outcomes (to what concrete consequences have such accomplishments led for those involved) (see Coalter, 2007; Nichols, 2007; Tacon, 2007). It is believed that this will contribute in creating better and more effective sports-based interventions for, amongst others, socially vulnerable youth.

Practical wisdom

In relation to sports-based social interventions, the call for more well-defined interventions with easier-to-follow outcomes may, however, be at odds with the open-ended philosophy that is viewed as a fundamental principle when engaging with socially vulnerable youth in a leisure context (Smith, 2003).

In their evaluation of several international sport-for-development programmes, Coalter and Taylor (2009) reported that sports programmes that adopted an open-ended street/youth worker approach tended to be more effective in terms of creating an added value through sports practices. They suggested that such programmes allow more in-depth, intensive and extensive social relationships. In a similar vein, researching a post-disaster sports-based intervention for youth in Iran (i.e., Sport and Play for traumatised children & youth), Kunz (2009) argued that the supportive environment created by the coaches played a crucial role in facilitating rehabilitative psychosocial outcomes, whereas Kay (2009) stated that the open and reflexive relationships formed between staff and participants within the context of a sport-for-development programme in India (i.e., GOAL), underpinned the success of the programme in terms of creating feelings of empowerment amongst female participants living in impoverished neighbourhoods. Regarding youth work practices in general, Smith (2003) argued that the relational aspect constitutes the cornerstone of youth work, and specifically youth work practices targeted at socially vulnerable youth. Based on extensive qualitative research done in an after-school setting (more specifically an urban Boys & Girls drop-in club), Jones and Deutsch (2010) have identified three strategies that staff used to develop relationships with youth, namely minimising relational distance, active inclusion and attention to proximal relational ties. According to the researchers, such relational strategies served as the foundation, for both youth engagement in the programme and the promotion of positive developmental outcomes (Jones and Deutsch, 2010).

In the domain of sports and physical education, the Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility (TPSR) model, as propagated by Hellison (1995, 2003), is equally based on strong instructor–participant relationships. The TPSR model, developed within the context of sports programmes working with inner-city socially vulnerable youth, is said to provide a set of values (for example, responsibility for others, leadership), and strategies to work towards such values (for example, reflection time, leadership opportunities) that could be fostered through sports-based practices for youth (Martinek and Hellison, 2009). The model has been used, researched and positively evaluated in several educational (Wright and Burton, 2008; Wright et al., 2010) and leisure settings (Hellison and Walsh, 2002). As such, it might provide a practice-based framework for nurturing relationships with young people in sports-based social interventions.

From their experiences of working for more than 50 years with socially vulnerable youth in sports-based settings, Martinek and Hellison (2009: 138) have stated the following regarding the TPSR model and the assessment of outcomes: ‘ […] we have found that assessment of certain aspects of our […] programs can be a messy business and does not always lead to “tangible” outcomes’. This seems to create a potential tension field. On the one hand, we need clear and well-defined interventions with easier-to-follow outcomes, and on the other hand, there is the recognition that any set of outcomes is hard to make tangible. Some authors (Crabbé, 2006; Haudenhuyse et al., 2012) have even stated that when sports are part of a personal and social development programme, there are no fixed outcomes to be pursued, and this is due to the variety of contexts in which programmes operate and the ever-changing challenges and needs that young people face in such contexts. What is more, research in Flanders (Coussée and Roets, 2011) and the UK (Tiffany, 2011) has illustrated how youth programmes pursuing fixed externally defined outcomes potentially have the perverse effect of excluding those who differ most from a desired developmental trajectory or programme endpoint. This is especially relevant if such a trajectory or endpoint is conceptualised based on mainstream conventions and practices regarding education, employment or positive youth development, conventions and practices that are perpetuated by the same institutions (for example, schools and career services) that make young people vulnerable in the first place. Based on a socio-historical analysis of youth work practices and discourses in Flanders, Van de Walle et al. (2010) have argued that the somewhat technocratic call to bring more structure into youth work practices (see Feinstein et al., 2005; Mahoney and Stattin, 2000), which would imply better structuring, defining and demarcating sports-based social interventions based on clearly pre-conceptualised outcomes, fails to acknowledge the complexities of social life, and might also even reinforce processes of social exclusion. In this context, Tiffanny and Pring (2008) have argued that the most marginalised young people are less likely to participate in highly structured and pre-described leisure activities. Perhaps this can be best illustrated in the domain of sports. It is an open secret that sports practices pursuing fixed and externally defined sports developmental or competitive outcomes will exclude young people, who might have other personal goals and needs in terms of sports participation and leisure time spending. In relation to young people in vulnerable situations, it has been suggested that certain young people reject organised, competitive mainstream sports, because such settings contain components similar to those that they have already failed to resolve (for example, adherence to formal rules, achievement of externally defined goals and testing situations in formal educational settings) (Andrews and Andrews, 2003; Sugden and Yiannakis, 1982). Related to youth sports and working towards broader outcomes, the importance of starting from young people, and not externally defined outcomes, has been formulated by Armour (2011) as follows:

If there is an underpinning belief that engagement in appropriate sport activities can be a ‘good’ thing for […] young people, offering a range of sport specific and personal, educational, social and health benefits, then the principle of understanding and addressing individual need […] is non-negotiable. (p.21)

The strength of effective sports-based, and other social interventions, may lie in the fact that such practices provide young people with experiences and safe supportive environments that are perhaps less likely to be provided by schools, family milieu or other (sports) contexts (Raes, 2011). Through this, sports-based social interventions may offer contexts in which young people could acquire competences to give meaning to their lives and help them cope with and change difficult situations (Coussée and Roets, 2011). In this context, Theeboom (2007) has questioned the need to attribute policy-led and top-down defined wider social roles to sports.

The question can be asked if sports indeed need to fulfil all of these expectations and should rather be viewed as an accessible activity which attracts a lot of young people and by doing so offers the opportunity for teachers, sports coaches, educators, youth workers…to work in an open-ended environment with a wide variety of specific groups in a positive manner. (p.51)

Hence, aligning sports-based social interventions in conformation with formal education or employment – containing social conventions that are the sources of exclusionary processes – or even conventional sports development, could potentially undermine the effectiveness and value of such practices, with the end result that young people are not reached anymore, or that such practices will fail to provide meaningful contexts for socially vulnerable young people.

Limitations of evidence-based sports policies and practices

Despite the strong call for more evidence-based practice and policy, propagators of the evaluation literature are not optimistic about the feasibility of putting their principles in practice. Weiss (1997: 73), for example, argued that ‘it is almost impossible to develop a plausible set of nested theoretical assumptions about how programs are expected to work’, whereas Pawson (2003: 486) stated that we can never really say what a programme is. Although the call for more realism, conceptual clarity and intellectual coherence is imperative, it is questionable if this will only be best served with better-articulated and predetermined programme outcomes in relation to working with socially vulnerable youth. If a more systematic and logical rationale is used as a framework, it should be made clear to what extent programmes are designed and delivered on the basis of believable theories of the complex causes of social vulnerability that such programmes seek to address (Rossi et al., 2004). If not, then it is highly likely that programmes or policy measures will be ineffective and even irrelevant in addressing such issues (Coalter, 2011). In addition, it needs be examined if sports-based interventions have been implemented as intended, but also if such interventions have lead to the expected results, for whom and why. Fundamentally, evaluating any intervention needs to encompass the dynamic interplay among values of participants and practitioners, the goals of the intervention and the broader external forces impacting the delivery of the activities (for example, school, neighbourhood, family). This is what Coalter (2010: 311), with reference to Pawson (2003), has formulated as understanding the social processes and mechanisms that might lead to desired outcomes for some participants or some organisations in certain circumstances. More importantly, the answers that such questions generate will need to add to the overall improvement of sports-based interventions in terms of design, organisational capacity and implementation (Burnett, 2001; Coalter, 2010).

The expressed need for more emphasis on effectiveness further runs the danger of creating the conception that processes of social vulnerability can be narrowed down into well-defined programme outcomes. In such a conception, complex processes are reduced to easily identified packages of social competencies or life skills (however defined) that are believed to be taught or caught in order to better align vulnerable young people to the requirements of the educational system, the labour market and society at large (Smith, 2003). Such a notion fails to recognise the structures and social arrangements that make young people socially vulnerable in the first place, and has the potential outcome of systematically reproducing young people as target groups (Weiss, 1997). Based on her analysis of four Positive Futures sports projects in the UK, Kelly (2011) has argued that sports-based practices failing to incorporate wider structural dimensions risk legitimating a reductive analysis of complex processes by highlighting individual deficits and de-emphasising structural inequalities.

In this context, it may be useful to mention what Münchmeier (1991) has referred to as installing biographic, institutional and political competences as a task of youth initiatives, such as sports-based social interventions. Biographic competence refers to the way coaches, or those working with young people in a sports setting, could give opportunities to young people to find out about who they are (for example, identity development, self-worth). Institutional competence encompasses supporting young people in finding access and making use of social institutions and services (for example, school, career services, sport clubs). Finally, political competence entails supporting young people in sharing ideas with others and having an impact on how policy makers shape the conditions in which they live, including access to institutional resources (see Coussée and Roets, 2011). This would include, amongst others, identifying and challenging processes of social exclusion.

Defined outcomes could be measured or indicators could be developed based on Münchmeier’s competences.

Socialising youth sports research

By no means are we arguing that outcomes, and the assumptions underlying the ways outcomes are supposed to be reached, should not be explicated, evaluated and researched. It remains important to analyse outcomes, but such measured outcomes need to be understood from the perspectives and the experiences of young people partaking in sports-based contexts. Analysing outcomes without taking into account the experiences and contexts in which such outcomes are facilitated, will create limited insights in how sports could potentially generate an added social value for youth, and in particular socially vulnerable youth. According to Coakley (2011), this would also need to include studying how young people learn about factors that negatively affect their lives and receive guidance in making informed decisions about participating in collective efforts to confront and change those factors. Such insights can provide practitioners and policymakers a better, more theory-based and fundamental understanding of how youth sport participation in general, and also specifically in relation to socially vulnerable groups, is related to various forms of social inclusion, current and future civic engagement and involvement in social and community development (Coakley, 2011).

Studying how sports-based social interventions are related to, for example, forms of civic engagement and involvement in community development, should not be restricted to socially vulnerable or disadvantaged young people. Restricting a focus on young people in vulnerable and disadvantaged situations runs the danger of creating a climate of blame, resulting in scape-goating the supposed beneficiaries, as well as practitioners and services implementing policies and interventions (Colley and Hodkinson, 2001). Problematically, to date, there is, to our knowledge, no available sociological research or even existing (researchable) sports-based interventions targeting advantaged young people, with the aim to integrate them better in society by instigating, for example, forms of civic engagement. Coakley (2011) has further noted that sociological research regarding youth sports is sorely lacking. Only recently, a few researchers have started to critically examine concepts such as, for example, positive youth development in sports from a broader socio-pedagogical perspective (see Coakley, 2011; Hartmann and Kwauk, 2011; Kelly, 2011).

Scrutinising positive youth development through sports

So, if outcomes are to be formulated or analysed, such outcomes need to go beyond narrow conceptions of individual development, and need to be defined in consultation with young people. In this respect, outcomes conceptualised from a premeditated positive youth developmental or at-risk (preventive) rationale will not provide the sufficient conditions under which sport can truly play a wider social role for socially vulnerable youth. Nor will they deepen our understanding about the potential value of sports-based social intervention for young people. According to Burnett (2001), an over-concentration on individual outcomes hinders a more contextualised understanding of the potential social impact that sports-based social interventions could have on the lives of socially vulnerable groups. An individual developmental rationale, such as the positive youth development movement, looks, for example, at the behavioural or attitudinal outcomes of youth engaged in a given sport context, without concomitant attention to the broader structures in which young people live. An inherent danger of such an approach is what Coalter (2010) referred to as a displacement-of-scope, by which potential micro-level individual outcomes are confused with broader macro-level impacts.

In a similar vein, France (2000) has warned that relying upon psychological theorising and models of social development, such as, for example, positive youth development, creates a narrow focus on what is a complex set of relationships and lives. Although the positive youth development movement seems to have shifted away from an individualist model to an ecological model that addresses the environmental contexts of youth development (see Benson, 2002; Eccles and Gootman, 2002), according to Sukarieh and Tannock (2011), these contexts seldom include broad social, economic and political issues, and pertain to circumscribed micro-contexts of school, family and local community. In this respect, the earlier mentioned TSRP model might also be criticised for not going beyond such micro-contexts.

Coakley (2011: 313) argued that positive development in sports programmes would also need to be defined in terms of the need for social justice, rebuilding strong community-based social institutions, re-establishing the resource base of the communities where young people live or empowering young people to be effective agents of social change in their communities. As such, sports-based social interventions would need to be evaluated on how such practices relate to a striving for more equality and social justice in society (Van de Walle et al., 2010). This is not to imply that sports-based social interventions should not aim at supporting young people in their personal development. Sports could play a role for (all) young people who struggle with specific problems or issues that are mainly related to their own person (for example, lack of self-assertiveness, social anxieties, depression, aggression, unhealthy high or low levels of self-esteem). The strength of the positive youth development movement lies in its empowering potential for young people from a broader contextual and asset-based perspective (see Holt, 2008). However, this empowering potential has been criticised for not being able to effectively go beyond the individual level, and has as such been referred to as narrow empowerment (Haudenhuyse et al., 2012; Lawson, 2005). Even though there is an emerging body of evidence, it has been indicated that, to date, research examining how to promote positive youth development through sports remains in its infancy (Holt, 2011).

The point to be made is that an individual-based developmental approach in which the endpoint is defined based on abstract notions of, for example, pro-social behaviour, should not be the starting point or the rationale of sports-based social interventions working with socially vulnerable young people. Vulnerable young people do not face abstract challenges; they rather face concrete challenges that require interventions that are based on a thorough analysis of such concrete social challenges. This could be done by focusing on young people’s narratives and interpretations in relation to their pasts, presents and futures (Foster and Spencer, 2011), which would allow a deepening of our understanding of sports-based social interventions targeted at youth. More importantly, according to Foster and Spencer (2011), a focus on young people’s narratives has the potential to improve the actual life circumstances of youth and, in particular, socially vulnerable youth. Again, in such an analysis Münchmeier’s (1991) notion of biographic, institutional and political competences might prove to be a useful framework for understanding the narratives of socially vulnerable young people in relation to forms of sports participation. It could be investigated how, from the perspectives of young people partaking in sports-based interventions, participation in such settings contributed in creating pathways to biographical, institutional and political competences. In such an investigation, it would also be important to include the perspectives of primary caregivers, significant others and those directly working with young people in sports-based settings. Furthermore, comparing the potential of sports-based social interventions in establishing biographical, institutional and political competences with other forms of social interventions (for example, youth club) in which (the same) young people partake, might give us more insights into the uniqueness of sports-based practices.

In order to ascertain the social impact of two sport-for-development programmes in the Republic of South Africa, Burnett (2001) developed a context-sensitive research instrument, namely the Sport Development Impact Assessment Tool (SDIAT). The competences, as identified by Münchmeier (1991), show some similarities with the different impact dimensions of the SDIAT, which encompasses the following:

Within the study of Burnett (2001), the macro-level impact dimension only related to sports development, and more specifically to the provision of school and public facilities, employment of qualified teachers and in-service training courses, whereas Münchmeier’s (1991) notion of political competence entails a broader scope. The meso-level impact dimension, with its focus on the functioning of community networks and the access to institutional resources that such networks facilitate, roughly overlaps with the notion of institutional competence. Related to understanding the impact on the holistic development of participants, Burnett (2001: 45) stated that ‘one has to establish how people interpret and give meaning to their lives within their social worlds’. As such, this micro-level impact dimension resembles the biographic competence. The SDIAT model, and in particular the participatory research strategies and methods that have been used in the research of Burnett (2001: 48), might provide a good framework of analysis that would allow researching Münchmeier’s competences within the context of sports-based social interventions. Such an evaluative framework could provide a possible solution for the seemingly uneasy position between, on the one hand, more effective and context-realistic sports-based social interventions and, on the other hand, more valuable and intellectually sound evaluation practices.

The (real) social value of sports?

The social value of sports-based social interventions cannot be restricted to their potential to get young people adjusted to societal norms and institutional requirements. Hartmann and Kwauk (2011) have challenged the dominant vision of using sports as a means for socialising youth into the existing order (including hegemonic conceptions of positive youth development), and by doing so reproducing relationships of inequality and reinforcing processes of social vulnerability. Influenced by the work of Freire (2008), the authors propose an alternative more radical vision, where sports practices are conceptualised as a form of political engagement and educative practice that could contribute to more fundamental social changes (Hartmann and Kwauk, 2011: 298). Available research, however, indicates that sports-based social interventions seem to have a limited potential regarding such issues of social change. For example, in his analysis of the Sport Steward Program (Netherlands), a sports-based intervention that aims at improving the social outlook and employability prospects of long-term unemployed and underemployed youth, Spaaij (2009: 262) argued that in many cases the programme failed to break through the system of social reproduction.

According to Van de Walle et al. (2010: 10), any form of youth work, including sports-based social interventions, should not be seen as a versatile instrument for social inclusion or integration of socially vulnerable young people, but needs to be understood as part of social life, and therefore inevitably a co-carrier of processes of, for example, social vulnerability. This understanding means a socio-pedagogical shift from the attention for individual well-defined outcomes, towards assuring social rights and equal access to socio-economical provisions for young people through sports-based social interventions. In addition, outcomes should not be restricted to socio-cultural factors such as improving social bonding with family, friends and caregivers, reducing anti-social or risky behaviours and changing (often improving) attitudes towards education and employment. A focus on attitudes, values and behaviours is, according to Colley and Hodkinson (2001), the hallmark of discourses that place a moral interpretation upon forms of social exclusion, and pathologises those considered to be socially vulnerable. If sports-based social interventions truly aim at improving lives of young people, their focus should also be targeted at structural factors regarding access to socio-economical resources, such as family income, education and employment, housing quality and neighbourhood status. By reading the previous sentence, one might immediately feel the inherent difficulty (perhaps improbability) of changing, for example, the housing quality or family income, through mere sports participation. However, as Spaaij (2009) argued, ‘[…] sport, as a relatively autonomous field, cannot be viewed in isolation from other social spheres, such as the family, education, labour market and government’ (p.262). Taking into account both socio-structural and socio-cultural factors related to processes of social vulnerability, we might become more modest and realistic about the potential of sports-based social interventions, to confront such complex processes.

Youth-defined interventions, with well-evaluated outcomes

In summary, the caveat that needs to be formulated is that well-defined interventions should not constitute pre-defined interventions. An open-ended approach that works towards externally pre-defined outcomes is, by definition, not an open-ended approach, and will fail to provide the necessary conditions that are required for reaching and meaningfully working with socially vulnerable young people. Such an open-ended coaching/guidance approach was described by Haudenhuyse et al. (2012) as a coaching attitude that puts young people’s well-being central and a coaching practice that is not based on abstract ideas about pro-social or positive development through sports, but rather starts from young people’s concrete needs and life situations. In light of what we have described, any framework that would be used needs to be flexible enough for practitioners to effectively address the ever-changing challenges that young people, and those working with young people, face. Although Hellison’s TPSR model is in essence a normative framework, according to Martinek and Hellison (2009) it constitutes a still-evolving developmental model with the intent to help stimulate and guide action for programme development in a variety of contexts, as well as facilitate self-reflection and evaluation.

In this paper, it was also indicated that interventions based on pre-defined outcomes have the potential effect of instigating exclusionary mechanisms. Taking into account the complex and every-changing nature that makes up the lives of young people, it could be questioned if supporting young people in socially vulnerable situations will be best served with well-defined sports-based social interventions with easy-to-follow outcomes. As argued above, it is necessary to re-socialise youth sports research in relation to sports-based social practices working with socially vulnerable youth. If not, there is the danger of de-socialising social vulnerability. This does not imply that practitioners and policymakers should not be upfront about the assumptions underlying their sport-plus practices and policies in terms of the outcomes that are reached (and also those that are not reached), and how such outcomes are related to deep-rooted processes and structures of social vulnerability.