Sports clubs as settings for health promotion: Fundamentals and an overview to research

Abstract

This paper explores the efficacy and value of sports clubs as a setting for health promotion. Sports clubs for children and adolescents are the primary focus of the paper, and the aims are twofold. Aims: Firstly, the paper aims to review the basis for and elements of the health promoting sports club (HPSC) concept. Secondly, the aim is to overview the international evolution of the HPSC concept and its usefulness in the research. The settings-based health promotion approach forms the basis for the HPSC concept and it is introduced first. Thereafter, both obligating and prospecting factors, to justify the importance for sports clubs to address health promotion, are expressed. major prospecting factors relate to the facts that sports club activities reach a lot of children and adolescents, and that its educational nature is informal due to voluntary participation. The paper also presents multilevel structure of sports clubs, as well as the determinants affecting the settingsbased work. The research concerning health promotion in sports-related settings is evolving worldwide, and Nordic countries are in the front line of this new-wave of settings-based health promotion. Indeed, it has been claimed that, for the settings approach to assimilate to current societal challenges, there is a need to widen the reach of the approach to non-traditional, non-institutional settings, like sports clubs.

Health promotion activities of sports clubs and coaches, and health and health behaviours in youth participating in sports clubs: the Health Promoting Sports Club study

“…The most important factor is that the educational nature of the clubs, due to voluntary participation of the youth, is informal 8. The youth participate because they have an interest in a given sport, which provides a great opportunity to tailor health promotion to a particular sport and development, together with providing a more effective setting for health promotion 41. This, in turn, highlights a need for clubs to consider how to draw more people and/or other activities to start developing their concepts.…”

Health Promotion Interventions in Sports Clubs: Can We Talk About a Setting-Based Approach? A Systematic Mapping Review

“…Interventions are defined in a wider sense as; "to disturb the "natural" order of things or a foreseeable sequence of events" (Hawe & Potvin, 2009), (c) empirical studies. Excluded studies focused on (a) settings other than sports clubs (defined as having "in common, the provision of opportunities for competition and sports practice, while some can also be considered social organizations, promoting social welfare and health" , (Donaldson, 2012) Content was extracted and analyzed descriptively, reporting: title, date of study, location, characteristics of the intervention (behavior focus, sport, name, public targeted, component of intervention), layer of the sports club included in the intervention (micro, meso, macro) (Kokko, 2014b), targeted socio-ecological level (intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional, community and policy) (Golden & Earp, 2012), theory-driven or model driven intervention (Glanz & Bishop, 2010) and study design and methods used (Appendix 1). The layer of the sports club was coded in regard to the actors implicated in the intervention, reported in the articles.…”

“…Different settings, such as schools (Rees et al, 2006), hospitals (Johnson & Baum, 2001), workplaces (Noblet, 2003), or cities (De Leeuw, 2009) have considered this (Golden & Earp, 2012), when implementing HP interventions. The settings approach is rooted in a socio-ecological understanding about health (Dooris, 2004) highlighting the importance of the whole system of the setting (Kokko, 2014b), rather than just individual responsibility, when promoting health.…”

“…Finally, an update of the Cochrane review (Priest et al, 2008a(Priest et al, , 2008b has been proposed, with the aim of measuring effectiveness of interventions implemented through sporting organizations in particular to promote physical activity, healthy diet, reductions in alcohol consumption or tobacco use (Flatz et al, 2016). The present systematic mapping review of a number of empirical studies analyses sports clubs' HP interventions from a theoretical perspective using the settings-based approach developed by Kokko and colleagues (Kokko, 2014b).…”

Physical Activity Trends of Finnish Adolescents With Long-Term Illnesses or Disabilities From 2002–2014

“…19 Sports clubs in Finland are mainly operated by voluntary civil activities and the main function of sports clubs is to organize sports activities, which are done with competitive aims and means to improve performance. 26 Training frequencies are seldom designed to be sufficient to meet the daily PA recommendations for health, and attention must also include the physical education and school-based PA perspectives. 24 The majority of coaches are volunteers, and most of the specialist training comes through informal learning.…”