Research
Reflections |
Tuesday 28 November
The tender for evaluating Positive Futures was one of those annoying occasions when our bid came second; two years later I was chairing a session at the launch of the final report. Positive Futures is a Home Office sponsored initiative to use sport (and now other activities as well) to wean young people from drugs and crime. The research team concluded that while sport has social value, it can best be realised if it is part of a social and personal development approach and other opportunities are also available.
The researchers argued that attempts to use quantitative methods to establish a causal link between doses of sport and a range of social policy concerns were destined for failure. Instead, they used participative action research, to explore how projects influence participants. A nice trick if you can pull it off, but unless it is possible to demonstrate that change has been successfully engineered, it is not really possible to explore how a project has worked. Fred Springer reported a parallel study in the US which used a quantitative approach to arrive at similar conclusions. On their own either is vulnerable to methodological detractors, but alongside each other the findings are telling.
Jonathan Long
Carnegie Faculty of Sport & Education
