AASP Newsletter - November 2017

Mindy Scott, MSc, Georgia Southern University
Brandonn S. Harris, PhD, CMPC, Georgia Southern University

Community-based programs frequently target underserved youth, or those who are vulnerable to not achieving optimal development (Forneris, Whitley, & Barker, 2013). Youth development programs are designed to prevent various social and well-being concerns, as well as enhance existing strengths in participants (Roffman, Pagano, & Hirsh, 2001). More specifically, physical activity-based programs have been demonstrated as an effective strategy for improving the social and emotional well-being of at-risk youth. One such program is called SUPER (Danish, 2002), which stands for Sports United to Promote Education and Recreation. The SUPER program uses sport and physical activity as a mechanism to teach a series of life skills, while also helping participants to recognize the relationship between success in sport and one’s endeavors outside of sport. This program also addresses its own sustainability by encouraging older adolescents to participate as leaders in its implementation. Doing so allows them to continue to lead future sessions without the dependence on an outside entity to support the program.

With the support of the AASP Community Outreach Grant, we were able to implement the SUPER curriculum at a local Boys and Girls Club, which is an international program serving youth who are at a high risk for delinquent behavior. For the present program, participants included 53 children between the ages of 8-11 years (M_age=9.54, SD=.96) who were in grades 3-5. Although the SUPER program has previously been implemented with existing sport teams using their respective sports, we sought to expose the youth to various types of physical activity. The funds we were awarded through the AASP Community Outreach Grant allowed us to purchase supplies so we could use kickball, football, Frisbee, basketball, wiffle ball, floor hockey, and Zumba to teach the different life skills in the program. The table below outlines our program’s schedule including the topic of each module and what sport was used:

Additionally, each module included an introduction to the topic, a written activity where the students wrote in their SUPER Playbooks, and time to participate in the sport / physical activity using the life skill they had just learned. The SUPER Playbooks included a brief overview of each topic as well as worksheet style sections where the participants wrote their personal experiences and goals relating to the life skill being discussed. Time was also spent at the end of each activity processing the lesson and how the respective life skill may have been demonstrated through their involvement in that module’s sport-related lesson as well.

Although the main objective of the grant involved implementing this program for our local Boys and Girls Club, we were also interested in collecting some preliminary data to examine its effectiveness. The children responded to the Life Skills Transfer Survey (LSTS; Weiss et al., 2014) for both the pre- and post-testing sessions. The LSTS is a 50-item self-report measure that reflects youth's perceptions of their ability to use life skills learned in one context and transfer it to another domain. The measure contains eight subscales including (a) meeting and greeting, (b) managing emotions, (c) goal setting, (d) resolving conflicts, (e) making healthy choices, (f) appreciating diversity, (g) getting help from others, and (h) helping others. For our participants, results suggested that among those who attended at least half of the sessions (of which approximately 81% of the sample did; M_{session attendance}=10.4 sessions), the ability to resolve conflict increased significantly from pre- to post-intervention (p=.021). This was particularly evident among 4^th and 5^th grade participants of the program.

In reflecting on this program’s implementation and results, certain implications and recommendations for future programs became evident. First, this program provided preliminary support for the use of the SUPER program with at-risk youth. This was particularly true when examining the statistically significant changes from pre- to post-testing on the resolving conflict scale. Further, this sample represented one of the younger groups thus far to be targeted using this program. Although we recruited children between 3^rd and 5^th grade, it appeared that some of the younger children within the 3^rd grade cohort may have struggled with understanding the content and assessment. Visek, Harris, and Blom (2009) noted that age in and of itself is not always a reliable marker for developmental stage; as such, we would recommend programs consider developmental stage in addition to age or year in school as they identify and recruit participants, as well as in tailoring the program’s content. This may have had an influence over the lack of significant findings in some of the other life skills areas measured within the LSTS. Finally, the sustainability of this particular program appeared to be more viable if training the Club’s staff to lead sessions, rather than only identifying older adolescent members of the Club to carry out the sessions consistently. Given that the Club’s staff had a more consistent presence compared to the youth members, this “train the trainer” approach with older staff seems appropriate for the sustainability of this important program. It may also help reduce any attrition that similar programs would likely encounter given the non-mandatory attendance at the Club. For the present project, 11 participants did not finish the program (n=3) or they completed the program but did not participate in post-testing (n=8). While perhaps not a large number given the size of many similar types of programs, future coordinators or facilities might consider implementing a modified, shortened version of the SUPER program. Indeed, previous studies have found some success using these programs over the span of 8 weeks (Papacharisis, Goudas, Danish, & Theodorakis, 2005).

References

Danish, S. (2002). SUPER (Sports United to Promote Education and Recreation) program: Leader manual (3^rd ed.). Richmond, VA: Virginia Commonwealth University.

Forneris, T., Whitley, M., & Barker, B. (2013). The reality of implementing community-based sport and physical activity programs to enhance the development of underserved youth: Challenges and potential strategies. Quest, 65, 313-331.

Papacharisis, V., Goudas, M., Danish, S., & Theodorakis, Y. (2005). The effectiveness of teaching a life skills program in a sport context. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 17, 247-254.

Roffman, J., Pagano, M., & Hirsh, B. (2001). Youth functioning and experiences in inner-city after-school programs among age, gender, and race groups. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 10(1), 85-100.

Visek, A. J., Harris, B. S., & Blom, L. C. (2009). Doing sport psychology: A youth sport consulting model for practitioners. The Sport Psychologist, 23, 271-291.

Weiss, M., Bolter, N., & Kipp, L. (2014). Assessing impact of physical activity-based youth development programs: Validation of the Life Skills Transfer Survey (LSTS), Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 85, 263-278.