More Than a Game of Football: A 1-Year Pilot Investigation of the Impact of Participation in a Community-Based Recreational Football Initiative for Men in Ireland on Health and Cardiovascular Risk
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Gender-responsive approaches that have used football have been shown to be effective in both engaging men and improving health in specific male populations. This paper reports on the health impact of participation in an ongoing recreational football initiative (Football Cooperative, [FC]) for all men up to 12M. Findings from this paper will inform the implementation strategy to scale up the FC initiative. Methods: Adopting a quasi-experimental, longitudinal design, without control, participants were recruited through purposeful sampling. Self-report, anthropometric, and fitness data were collected at baseline and at 3, 6, and 12 months. Results: Findings show a significant improvement in aerobic fitness at all time points, a positive trend in WC reduction that was significant at 12M (2.5±4.6 cm) and an achievement in the 5% weight-reduction threshold for 17% of those tested at 12M. cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk (≥5 factors) reduced from baseline (52%) to 12M (26%). Loneliness reduced at 6M with a corresponding improvement in sleep quality. However, trends toward improved psychological and health behaviour metrics are evident; the low sample size coupled with high baseline metrics, which may be influenced by gender conditioning, were a challenge to detecting change over time. Conclusion: Participation in the FC initiative reduced CVD risk and improved health metrics ; men should be supported to participate beyond 6M for increased benefit. Future research should use alternative methods to assess psychological and health behaviour metrics and aerobic fitness and should ensure a control group comparison. These findings will inform the implementation of the FC initiative at scale.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".