Development of an Online Multilingual Educational Programme for Parents of Dual-Career Athletes: A Participatory Design

Abstract

There is a need for educational support structures to empower parents in sustaining talented athletes pursuing academic and sports careers (e. g., dual career). The present work describes the participatory design used to develop a series of educational resources and the subsequent iterations used to evaluate the content of the EMPATIA online education programme for parents of dual-career athletes. Following an ethnographic approach, the project team (18 dual-career experts) engaged in four iterations (i.e., rounds) planned to develop (rounds 1 and 2) educational material from preliminary evidence (systematic literature review) and eminence (focus groups and concept mapping) knowledge and to evaluate the educational programme (round 3 and 4) engaging end users (n = 76) and other stakeholders (9 dual-career experts). The EMPATIA programme was developed and organized in four modules labeled after macro-aspects, parents could ask about dual career: “Why” (the definition and challenges of dual career for athletes and their parents), “What” (insights, guidelines, and suggestions on the parental role in support of student-athletes), “How” (practical advice on planning dual career at sports and academic levels, and post-sports careers), and “Where” (finding legal information or counseling on dual career). Despite overall positive evaluations of the programme, parents of dual-career athletes attributed higher scores with respect to those of dual-career experts. The participatory approach presented in this work enables developers to apply a systematic and multidisciplinary approach toward the creation of educational programmes for parents. The cooperation among dual-career researchers, experts from high-performance centers, Olympic bodies, sports clubs, and parents of elite student-athletes of different sports and nationalities created an educational programme suitable for end users to support parenting athletes in combining their sports and academic careers.

Educational Needs for Coaching Judo in Older Adults: The EdJCO Focus Groups

“…Furthermore, the use of the focus group methodology was deemed suitable to provide the participants with plenty of possibilities to freely interact and discuss specific themes of judo for older individuals and to agree on the key issues to be included in an educational programme for coaches [ 30 , 32 ]. With participants playing a central role within the group discussion and the researcher/observer proposing, facilitating, and moderating a logical sequence of open-ended questions on specific topics, the focus groups proved to be an effective and sustainable qualitative research methodology [ 9 , 30 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 ]. To ensure the relevance and accuracy of the outcomes, the EdJCO project team produced guidelines for the conduction of the focus groups, encompassing the information to be provided to participants before the group discussion, the methodological approach to stimulate balanced participation, the data collection and synthesis, and the translation and back-translation of statements from the national languages of the EdJCO project partners (e.g., Croatian, Italian, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Türkish) to English ( Supplementary Material S1 ).…”

The holistic development of talented sportspersons through dual-career

“…Recent research focusing on the parent's role in sustaining athletes' dual-career highlighted difficulties in establishing meaningful relationships with sports and academic staff for the construction of a coherent dual-career support environment (Gjaka et al, 2021 ; Tessitore et al, 2021 ; Varga et al, 2021 ). In considering that parents may lack the required knowledge to work individually and in teams with other key dual-career actors, a European framework informed the development of an online education programme for parents within the Erasmus+ Sport project EMPATIA to empower them in promoting a positive dual-career environment for their talented children (Capranica et al, 2018 , 2022 ; Varga et al, 2021 ). To avoid the mutual interference between educational and athletic environments, academic and sport, staff might consider rethinking their role through appropriate formal (e.g., degree programs) non-formal (e.g., refreshment courses), and informal (e.g., reading, conversations with experts) training opportunities.…”

Exploring dual career quality implementation at European higher education institutions: Insights from university experts

“…In general, respondents declared that dual career tutorship/mentorship is the only service offered at their HEIs. In considering that HEIs usually provide several services for students (e.g., academic orientation, consultation, career and personal counselling, and psychological support), it seems quite feasible to prioritize the implementation of dual career by providing specific training to the HEI personnel, also considering possible connection between different actors of the meso dimension such as parents and coaches [6,[43][44][45][46]. In addition to psychologists and dual career staff, HEI experts also identified professors having a positive perception of student-athletes as potential tutors to assist the sport-study combination and to create an academic environment promoting the student-athletes commitment to higher education [47,48].…”