‘I know how researchers are […] taking more from you than they give you’: tensions and possibilities of youth participatory action research in sport for development

ABSTRACT

Critical scholarship in sport for development (SfD) advocates transformative research to disrupt the historical colonising view of sport as a vehicle to acculturate people into the values and norms of dominant Western culture. Youth participatory action research (YPAR) involves youth throughout the research process and consequently has the potential to challenge hegemonic forms of knowledge production in SfD. In reality, however, authentic engagement of co-researchers in the research process is often largely confined to data collection. This article draws on the decolonising lens as a theoretical framework to examine tensions, possibilities, and power relations that researchers and co-researchers encounter when co-designing and implementing YPAR in SfD. The project comprised a sixteen-week YPAR in a community-based football programme in Melbourne, Australia. Data collection comprised weekly collaborative meetings, observations collected as field notes, artefacts produced by participants, interviews, and reflective meetings. Findings centred on three themes: (a) finding sensitive ways to navigate the tensions of building trust and rapport; (b) negotiating the struggle between the co-researchers and the coaches about the use of space within the sport context; and (c) the challenges of relinquishing power in research and knowledge production, as reflected in our collective struggle to communicate to participants the value of YPAR for themselves and their communities. The findings challenge a romantic view that YPAR is guaranteed to be an empowering experience for young people; instead, they foreground the complexities and messiness of the process of sharing power with co-researchers in SfD. We conclude by advocating for critical, reflexive YPAR with explicit social transformation objectives to work toward the co-production of knowledge with young people.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth participatory action research
• power relations
• decolonising methodologies
• forced migration
• football
• sport for development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 YPAR has the same transformational goals as PAR but further recognises young people as ‘intellectual beings capable of engaging in the practice of critical investigation of community issues and the production of viable, usable knowledge’ (Caraballo et al., 2017, p. 315).

2 Although the assumed values in developing leaders could be critiqued by using a decolonial lens, it is important to highlight that this is the official statement of the institution. In our previous study we found that the organisation practised culturally relevant practices (see Luguetti et al., 2020). For example, the coaches considered themselves ‘barrier breakers’: they were able to connect the African Australian young people to different resources in and outside of sports contexts to develop their success in football and in life. The coaches considered the sport programme ‘a family’ where they were willing to nurture and support cultural competence by sharing power with the participants and their community. Finally, the coaches created spaces for young people to develop awareness that allowed them to critique some of the social inequities experienced.

3 We are considering ‘young people’ as those aged 15–24 years and this is consistent with previous Australian publications (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare). Defining young people as those aged between 15 and 24 years is a widely accepted statistical convention and is used in many studies on youth. Although Nyayoud was 26, she still considered herself a young person.

 

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Institute for Health and Sport, Early Career Researcher Grant, Victoria University.