Sport-for-social-change programs focusing on enhancing young people’s personal and social development emerged in the early to mid-2000s. Children and adolescents who participated in early programs are now adults, providing an opportunity to examine whether these programs have had any influence on their life trajectories. The Football United program has been operating in Sydney, Australia, since 2006 and is used as a case study in this article. This qualitative study draws on 20 interviews conducted in 2018 with a diverse sample of past participants of the program. Key findings were that participants perceived that the relationships they formed at Football United have had a substantial impact on their life trajectories, including influencing education and career decisions. These relationships were found to increase participants’ social capital, creating diverse connections with people and institutions within and external to their geographical communities. This study also found participants embraced a long-term commitment to ‘give back’ to their local geographical, cultural, and ethnic communities, which they attributed to their participation in the program.
THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEMStudents of comparative politics are searching for cross-culturally st attitudinal concepts, especially concepts to bridge the differences betw citizens of developed and developing countries. Such stable conce facilitate comparisons among countries along various dimensions as well speculations about the direction of change for the developing count However, the application of questionnaires and the deriving of composi measures for comparison between any two populations without intern consistency checks in both populations can cause misleading conclusio by the investigator. This research reports Jordanian findings on an alienation measure-theoretically defined as 'alienation via rejection'-which was pronounced unidimensional by factor analysis criteria after testing among U.S. groups (Struening and Richardson, 1965}.1 The items w ere administered to a population of Jordanian teachers and checked for 1 cross-cultural unidimensionality. For the Jordanian population, the alienation items fell on two dimensions which could best be described as perception of one's relationship to other individuals in the society and perception of one's relation to the institutions of society.2 Some recent work has been done using U.S. data to assess structure, relationships, and correlates of citizen perceptions of society.3 These 24, 2015 at University of British Columbia Library on June cps.sagepub.com Downloaded from [92] studies show that categorizing perceptions of society by object focus is empirically sound and, at least in some cases, theoretically useful4 This research note attempts to show that the items tested constitute two distinct dimensions for the population in question and then speculates on the resulting theoretical implications. METHODOLOGY AND FINDINGSData were obtained from a survey carried out among 1,201 Jordanian teachers in the summer of 1966.5 Forty-six of the questionnaire items covered the hypothesized dimensions of achievement motivation, alienation, and dogmatism. Each respondent was asked to indicate whether he or she agreed, agreed somewhat, disagreed somewhat, or disagreed with each statement. Responses were scored on a one to four continuum. Nonresponse rate ranged between one percent and two percent for each item. Nonresponses were scored two, which most closely approximated the mean for all questions. An interval level of measurement was assumed. Evidence that discrete dimensions are being isolated can be demonstrated empirically (a) by showing that the elements of the composite measures are interrelated using scalogram or factor-analytic criteria, or (b) by showing that the composite measures correlate significantly with different other variables (Rosenberg, 1968: 7). The analysis here employs each of these procedures.Despite varying numbers of factor-analytic rotations, the alienation items continually coalesced around two dimensions, which could be described as perception of individuals and perception of institutions respectively (see Table 1). Note that items which load...
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