Cheryl P. Stuntz

‘More Than a Game’: Impact of The First Tee Life Skills Programme on Positive Youth Development: Project Introduction and Year 1 Findings

This manuscript introduces our long-term project and provides Year 1 data on evaluating the effectiveness of The First Tee life skills programme in promoting positive youth development. To set up subsequent articles on this multi-phase project, we provide: (a) a review of the positive youth development theoretical framework and studies in the physical domain, (b) an in-depth description of The First Tee, a sport-based youth development programme, (c) overall project purposes and research design, (d) Year 1 samples, methodology, procedures and evaluation methods and (e) Year 1 findings for learning and transferring interpersonal and self-management skills that were taught in the programme. Findings provide initial data-based evidence that The First Tee is having a positive impact on promoting youth development in the golf context and in the transfer of life skills to other domains.

Motivating Children and Adolescents to Sustain a Physically Active Lifestyle

Knowing that children’s and adolescents’ physical activity should be increased is not enough to enhance their activity frequency, intensity, and duration. Motivating youth to initiate, continue, and sustain physical activity enables them to embrace an active lifestyle that leads to a variety of health benefits. An understanding of the psychological and social predictors of physical activity behaviors is essential to contributing to active lifestyles. Adults in children’s lives can structure everyday environments in ways that enhance children’s motivation for physical activity. The pathways to enhancing physical activity motivation, activity behaviors, and positive health outcomes include 4 common elements or ingredients: feelings of competence, perceptions of choice or autonomy, supportive relationships, and enjoyment of activity participation. Simply providing information to youth about benefits, frequency, and duration of physical activity is not sufficient for enhancing physical activity behavior. Subtle changes in framing physical activities can have a dramatic influence on youths’ physical activity motivation and behaviors. Adults should encourage youth to participate in activities they find enjoyable, feel competent doing, have chosen to do, and that include positive social support—these conditions optimize their motivation for sustaining physical activity and thus the physical, social, and psychological health benefits afforded from such participation.

Enhancing Social Goal Involvement through Cooperative Instructions

The current study examined the influence of giving competitive, cooperative, and individualistic goals on goal involvement. After being given cooperative, competitive, or individualistic goals, college students (N = 198; 65 male, 133 female) played a social dilemma task and completed questions assessing task, ego, and cooperative goal involvement. Experimental grouping significantly predicted goal involvement, with cooperative group participants defining success by working with partners more often and outperforming others less often than competitive group participants did. As social ways of defining success generally predict beneficial motivation-related outcomes (e.g., Hodge, Allen, & Smellie, 2008; Stuntz & Weiss, 2009), promoting cooperative goals appears beneficial.

Predicting psychological need satisfaction from differential coach treatment: Does receiving more of the coach’s attention than teammates matter?

This study examined whether differential treatment that individual athletes perceive predicted psychological need satisfaction. Perceiving more frequent interactions of all types (including both more positive instructive and supportive behaviours as well as more negative rapport) than other individuals on the team received were hypothesised to relate to higher basic psychological need fulfilment. Collegiate athletes (N= 249) completed surveys assessing coach treatment to them and to other individuals on the team regarding technical skills instruction, how well coaches knew about athletes’ lives outside of sport, and negative rapport as well as assessing perceived competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Similar to hypotheses yet counter-intuitive to many, those athletes who believed they received more negative rapport than others on the team received also perceived greater relatedness and autonomy, while those athletes who believed their coach knew and cared about all aspects of their lives outside of sport more than the coach did for others on the team perceived greater competence and relatedness. How athletes are treated in comparison to how teammates are treated matters, even after accounting for coach treatment towards athletes themselves in analyses.

Is the relationship between lifestyle factors and physical activity mediated by psychological needs and motivation

In general, participating in activities for self-determined reasons (i.e. because you “want to” engage in the activity) results in stronger levels of motivation that last longer than participating for more controlled forms of motivation (i.e. because you feel you “have to” participate). As having unsatisfied physical needs through drinking alcohol, eating poorly, and sleeping little or less consistently may interrupt self-determined forms of motivation for physical activity, we hypothesised that basic psychological needs satisfaction and self-determined motivation would mediate the lifestyle–leisure-time physical activity (LTPA) relationship. Undergraduate college students (N = 887) completed an on-line survey assessing food consumption, alcohol use, sleep patterns, basic need satisfaction, self-determined motivation, and level of LTPA. Eating breakfast more regularly, eating more fruit and vegetables, sleeping earlier in the night, and staying up later on weekends than weeknights were associated with higher LTPA levels and these effects were mediated through psychological variables. In contrast, eating more carbohydrates and dairy and drinking more alcohol directly associated with LTPA, but not through the proposed psychological mediators. Results support the link between physical and psychological factors promoting LTPA, identify those lifestyle choices that most closely relate to psychological need satisfaction and self-determined motivation, and encourage searches for other possible mediators for linking dairy and carbohydrate intake and alcohol use with LTPA.