Community sport programmes and social inclusion: what role for positive psychological capital?

Abstract

(Re-)Engagement with education and employment is a common objective within interventions designed to enhance social inclusion through sport participation. Consequently, the acquisition of capital to expedite the (re)engagement process has become a familiar theme. Literature has examined how various forms of capital may be accumulated through participation in sport. However, competing literature has explored how participation may enable positive psychological capital—which comprises personal qualities such as resilience, hope, optimism and self-efficacy—to be developed. This article adds to this work, by providing insights from a sports-based project which aimed to develop social inclusion among marginalized youth in three regions of the UK. Utilizing data from semi-structured interviews, we highlight how participation enabled young people to enhance the components of positive psychological capital, and offer a further theoretical vantage point from which to understand and debate the relationship between participation in sport and social inclusion.

Keywords:

• Sport
• social inclusion
• positive psychological capital
• marginalized youth
• interventions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Within this article, we refer to human capital as the knowledge, information and skills that an individual develops (Becker 2006), while social capital is conceptualized as the resources which are accrued through a network of institutionalized relationships (Bourdieu 1986).

2. It should be noted that the concept of positive psychological capital closely equates to broader notions of ‘life skills’ or ‘individual skill development’, which numerous studies have examined in connection with participation in sport (see, for example, Meek and Lewis 2012; Meek 2013). However, few of these studies have explicitly utilized the concept of positive psychological capital to frame their analyses.

3. We acknowledge that, in an analytical sense, our emphasis on ‘positive psychological capital’ in this paper (and more specifically, the clear link between this term and employability), allies itself to a relatively conservative conception of social inclusion and one which, in light of DeLuca’s helpful typology of social inclusion, might be seen as ‘normative or ‘integrative’ (see DeLuca 2013).

4. In order to preserve anonymity, pseudonyms have been used throughout.

5. Variations on interview timings were solely due to the availability of respondents.