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| Feature | No.65 October 2013 |

Promoting Physical Activity Participation via More Empowering Sport Experiences: The PAPA Project

Quested, E. , Duda, J.L. & Balaguer, I.

Abstract

The motivational climate created by teachers and coaches is recognized to be an important determinant of the motivational processes and quality of engagement experienced by children and adolescents in sport, PE and other physical activity contexts. However, there is variability in the quality of the climate coaches create, and as a consequence, many young people do not capitalize on the potential of youth sport as a setting in which to develop physical literacy. The European-wide PAPA (Promoting Adolescent Physical Activity) Project strove to implement and rigorously evaluate the impact of a coach education programme (Empowering CoachingTM). This programme was specifically designed to help coaches optimize the motivation, and in turn, well-being and physical activity behaviours of young sport participants. This article highlights the key features of PAPA and points to the potential and important role of Empowering CoachingTM as a means to help to empower more young people via sport participation.

Introduction

Physical literacy has been defined as, “the motivation, confidence, physical competence, knowledge and understanding to value and take responsibility for maintaining purposeful physical pursuits/activities throughout the life course” (Whitehead, 2013). Central to this definition is the concept of motivation and related constructs such as confidence and competence. Despite the recognition that motivational processes are important facets in the development of physical literacy (and related behavioural consequences such as regularly engaging in physically activities), attempts to promote correlates of this important construct have tended to lack a theoretical and/or evidence-derived basis.

The current situation

Organised youth sport is an obvious setting within which there is the potential for young people to develop physical literacy. For the last three decades numerous theory-based academic articles have highlighted what might be the relevant social-psychological processes to foster, rather than diminish young peoples’ autonomous motivation in sport and Physical Education (PE). The participation in sport, PE and other physical pursuits for intrinsic reasons (i.e., autonomous motivation), is reflected when young people participate for reasons such as enjoyment, accomplishment and satisfaction (Deci & Ryan, 2000). Numerous benefits to well-being and sustained physical activity engagement have been associated with autonomous reasons to participate in sport (Ryan & Deci, 2007). However, in “the real world” a growing number of young people choose to disengage from participating in sport during the mid-teens (Sarrazin et al., 2007). The consequences of this are far reaching and for some, fatal; low or insufficient physical activity is well recognized to predict overweight and obesity, and these conditions are, in turn, known to severely impact upon longevity and quality of life (Schwimmer, Burwinkle, & Varni, 2003). Thus, in a world facing a global obesity crisis, the importance of developing and developing physical literacy and sustaining physical activity among European youth has never been more prominent.

Research has indicated that, despite the potential allure of sedentariness, there remains one malleable factor that, if optimized, could lead more and more people to develop and sustain more autonomous motivation to participate in sport and exercise. That factor is the social environment created by the significant other who is present when young people experience and engage in sport and PE. This might be the community sport coach and/or PE teacher. More specifically, research grounded in achievement goal and self-determination theories (Ames, 1992; Nicholls, 1989; Deci & Ryan, 2000) has highlighted that when coaches/teachers create an “empowering” climate (Duda, in press) young people are more likely to develop and sustain more autonomous motivation for sport.

An empowering sport climate is one that supports young people’s feelings of autonomy, belonging, and task-focused (i.e., self-referenced) sense of competence (Duda, in press). When these basic needs are supported, sport participants are understood to adopt more autonomous reasons to engage in the activity (Deci & Ryan, 2000) and be less likely to drop out of sport (Quested et al., in press). This reduces the risk of the adoption of inactive lifestyles. These premises closely align with constructs embedded in definitions of physical literacy and thus, it makes sense that those working with young people should be optimally equipped to support these basic psychological needs. Unfortunately, coach and teacher education programmes typically do not draw from theory to systematically and deliberately target how young people’s sport and PE motivation can be effectively developed and maintained.

The Promoting Adolescent Physical Activity Project

The European-wide PAPA (Promoting Adolescent Physical Activity; www.projectpapa.org) project (Duda, et al., in press) was specifically designed to identify whether it is possible to diffuse the motivation-related knowledge base gained from theory and research to empower coaches working with young people to create environments supportive of autonomy, belonging and task-focused competence. As such, PAPA aimed to address an important void in coach education and in turn, tackle the global obesity problem by empowering more young people to be active and engaged in sport within and beyond the teenage years. More specifically, the PAPA Project further developed and rigorously evaluated the impact of a theory-grounded and evidence-based coach education programme (Empowering Coaching™; Duda, in press) upon young people’s motivation to take part in sport and ensuing well-being and a desire to stay active.

Funded by the European Commission (Framework 7 Health), PAPA has provided a unique opportunity for a large-scale investigation into the social-environmental and motivational processes at play in the community-based youth sport context, across Europe. The PAPA project was conducted in England, France, Greece, Norway, and Spain. According to self-determination theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 2000) when coaches support young athletes by being autonomy supportive (i.e., providing opportunities for choice, decision-making, providing rationale and taking perspective), being socially supportive (i.e., show care, concern and respect, unconditionally) supporting their competence (i.e., provide structure within which to tackle challenging but realizable goals), young people will in turn, experience higher autonomy, competence and relatedness satisfaction and will be more intrinsically motivated to stay involved in sport. Achievement goal theory points to the importance of perceptions of competence being self-referenced (Nicholls, 1989) and grounded in the experience of self-improvement, exertion of effort and task mastery. Accordingly, Duda’s conceptualization of an empowering climate integrates the construct of basic psychological need satisfaction from SDT with an appreciation of the importance of developing a strong task orientation in young athletes via fostering not just competence per se, but a task-involved sense of competence (Duda, in press).

The PAPA project has created the opportunity and resource for the further development of the Empowering Coaching™ programme into a 6-hour workshop (with associated learning materials) and an e-learning course, all specifically customized for grassroots football (soccer). With a view towards potential long-term transferability and sustainability, an important consideration within PAPA was that non-academics could be trained to deliver the Empowering Coaching™ workshops. This marked the first major success of the project; that is, PAPA demonstrated that it was possible to train experts in coach education with no previous knowledge in or experience of motivation psychology, to understand, and subsequently deliver the coach education programme. To this end, there exists a circa 20 hour tutor training programme developed within PAPA that ensures tutors can be trained to deliver the workshop programme with a high level of fidelity coupled with their own tacit knowledge of the context at hand.

Following a two-year phase of intervention development, piloting and targeted questionnaire development, the PAPA project team embarked upon a main trial, in which we tested the effects of the Empowering Coaching™ intervention upon variables central to the design and theoretical premises of the intervention itself. These included the young players’ perceptions of the social environment created by the coach, the players’ basic psychological need satisfaction and motivation regulations for playing football, and various indices associated with physical and psychological health and functioning. Nearly 10,000 young footballers aged 9-15 participated in the project. The young players (and their coaches) completed questionnaires at the beginning and end of the soccer season. A sub-sample of coaches were also filmed and their behaviours were rated (according to a theory-based rating scheme; Smith, et al., 2013) in terms of the degree to which they were empowering and disempowering. A further sub-sample of players also wore accelerometers enabling their activity levels during and outside of the football setting to be objectively recorded.

The football coaches were also actively involved in the research, not only as attendees at the workshop (in the case of the intervention arm) but they also completed questionnaires concerning their perceptions of the motivational climate they create. A sub-sample of coaches in England and Spain also took part in focus group interviews, which explored the degree to which the central tenets of Empowering Coaching™ had been understood and effectively integrated into their coaching practice (Quested, Duda & Appleton, 2011).

Preliminary findings emanating from the PAPA project research activities have added support to the postulation that coach behaviours are relevant to adolescents’ enjoyment and intentions to sustain or drop out of sport (Quested et al., in press). More specifically, in their study of 7769 players who completed time one (baseline) questionnaires in the project, Quested and colleagues were able to find support for the SDT-based hypothesis that players’ perceptions of autonomy supportive climates (an important dimension of empowering climates (Duda, in press) significantly predicted the players’ feelings of autonomy, competence and relatedness. As the theory would predict, this basic psychological need satisfaction positively predicted football enjoyment that, in turn negatively predicted intentions to drop out of football. SDT theorizes that these associations should be consistent regardless of culture and context and this study was able to support the invariance of the hypothesized model among samples of children from England, France, Greece, Norway and Spain.

At the time of this article going to press, the PAPA project is still underway and analyses of main trial data are ongoing. However, as the PAPA project per se winds down, the stage is now set for the further development and establishment of the Empowering Coaching™ social enterprise. This not-for-profit research and development organization, based at the University of Birmingham (UK) will be a hub for the further development and delivery of education programmes (for coaches, teachers, parents, and young people themselves) that are founded in the principles of Empowering Coaching™.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the work undertaken as part of the PAPA project makes an important contribution towards our understanding of the social-environmental and motivational processes that might be important to developing young people’s sense of physical literacy. Specifically, as a project embedded in theory, PAPA has illustrated why a more empowering coaching climate may be an important contributor towards young people’s quality of sport experience and the psychological, physical and social gains accrued. Moreover, the development and successful implementation of a training programme that enables the widespread dissemination of Empowering Coaching™ workshops delivered to coaches by non-academics illustrates how theory-based interventions can translate into reality in the sports field. However, community sport is just one arena in which young people experience and develop their competencies and feelings towards sport. Physical illiteracy remains an ongoing threat when young people are at risk of entering other environments (e.g., the PE class, the home) where their sense of competence and motivation towards physical activity may be deflated or actively thwarted. Thus, the further development and testing of training programmes that target and empower the different environments where young people are physically active will be the important next step for the Empowering Coaching™ enterprise.

References

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3. Duda, J.L., (in press). The conceptual and empirical foundations of Empowering Coaching™: Setting the stage for the PAPA project. International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology.

4. Duda, J.L., Quested, E., Haug, E., Samdal, O., Wold, B., Balaguer, I., Castillo, I., Sarrazin, P., Papaioannou, A., Ronglan, L-T., Cruz, J., Hall, H.K. (in press). Background to and protocol of the PAPA project. International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology.

5. Nicholls, J. G. (1989). The competitive ethos and democratic education. London: Harvard University Press.

6. Quested, E., Ntoumanis, N., Viladrich, C., Haug, E., Ommundsen, Y., Van Hoye, A, Mercé, J., Hall, H.K., Zourbanos, N., Duda, J.L. (in press). Intentions to drop-out of youth soccer: A test of the basic needs theory among European youth from five countries. International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology.

7. Quested, E., Duda, J.L., Appleton, P. (2011). A qualitative evaluation of coaches’ implementation of the Empowering Coaching TM approach. 13th Annual Congress for Sport Psychology (FEPSAC), Madeira, Portugal, July 2011

8. Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2007). Active human nature: Self-determination theory and the promotion and maintenance of sport, exercise, and health. In M. S. Hagger & N. L. D. Chatzisarantis (Eds.), Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in exercise and sport (pp. 1-19). Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.

9. Smith, N., Tzioumakis, Y., Tessier, D., Appleton, P.R., Quested, E., Duda, J.L. (2013). Initial examination of the psychometric properties of the multidimensional motivational climate observation system. 18th Annual European College of Sport and Exercise Science Congress, June 2013, Barcelona, Spain

10. Sarrazin, P., Boiche, J. C. S., & Pelletier, L. G. (2007). A self-determination theory approach to dropout in athletes. In M. S. Hagger & N. L. D. Chatzisarantis (Eds.), Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in exercise and sport (pp. 229-242). Leeds: Human Kinetics.

11. Schwimmer, J. B., Burwinkle, T. M., & Varni, J. W. (2003). Health-related quality of life of severely obese children and adolescents. Journal of the American medical Association, 289, 1813-1819.

12. Van Hoye, A., Fenton, S., Krommidas. C., Heuzé, J-P., Quested, E., Papaionnou, A., & Duda, J.L. (in press). Physical activity and sedentary behaviours among grassroots football players: A comparison across three European countries. International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology.

13. Whitehead, J., (2013). Physical Literacy. Accessed at www.physical-literacy.org.uk, 30 August 2013

Contact

Quested, E.
School of Sport, Exercise, and Rehabilitation Sciences,
University of Birmingham,
Edgbaston,
Birmingham,
B15 2TT.
United Kingdom
Email e.j.quested@bham.ac.uk

http://www.icsspe.org/