Examining the Importance of Intentionally Structuring the Youth Sport Context to Foster Needs Support and Positive Youth Development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sport has been identified as a favorable environment in which to promote positive youth development (PYD) as sport programming has been identified as the most popular extra-curricular activity for youth across North America. However, researchers argue that the context of sport must be intentionally structured to yield positive psychosocial outcomes. Environments that foster the three basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness have also been found to aid in positive psychological development. Moreover, deliberately teaching life skills has been identified as a critical component that can aid in the enhancement of PYD within sport programs. PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to examine differences in program quality, basic needs support, and PYD outcomes across three youth programming contexts (intentional sport, non-intentional sport, and intentional leadership) pertaining to the importance of intentionally teaching life skills. METHODS: Researchers conducted 184 observations to assess program quality across 26 youth programs. Within these programs, 377 youth completed three questionnaires that measured perceptions of program quality, basic needs support, and PYD outcomes. RESULTS: Results indicated intentionally structured programs scored higher on program quality, basic needs support, and PYD outcomes than non-intentionally structured programs, with intentional sport programs scoring significantly higher on some measures of program quality, basic needs support, and PYD than intentionally structured leadership programs. CONCLUSION: Understanding that it is important to intentionally teach life skills can help scholars working on the ground with stakeholders, particularly sport administrators involved in coach education and the development and evaluation of sport programs, to be able to improve applied practice. The knowledge derived from this research has the potential to inform how the context of youth sport should be structured to ensure that the sport context is one that not only of high quality, but also facilitates rather than inhibits needs support and positive developmental outcomes in youth. Supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".