Looking beyond the “intended beneficiary”: parent experiences and perspectives of child participation in sport-for-development programs at an inner-city Toronto sport facility

ABSTRACT

Rationale/purpose: Although there have been studies on the impact of families and sport for development (SFD) in regard to youth participants, less is known about parent experiences of SFD. The purpose of this study is to explore parent experiences of SFD and how SFD affects family life outside of the program setting.

Research methods: In this study, an interpretive qualitative approach was adopted to explore parent experiences of SFD. Semi-structured interviews and focus groups were utilized for the purposes of generating grounded knowledge in a practical research setting.

Findings: Data analysis revealed three themes of SFD and parents: (1) social benefits directly related to parent’s day-to-day lives; (2) the (usually) safe and family-oriented space of SFD; and (3) parent expectations of SFD as well as opportunities for family bonding outside the SFD space.

Practical implications: The implications of this study call attention to the ways sport managers, SFD scholars and practitioners may seek to further involve parents and families in SFD initiatives.

Research contributions: This research builds and extends on SFD research that examines parent perspectives by highlighting the ways SFD affects parents in ways that may not be immediately noticeable when examining programs.

KEYWORDS:

• Parents
• sport for development
• family
• children

Acknowledgement

Thank you to all the parents who participated in this study as well as MLSE LP staff (especially Marika Warner and Bryan Heal) who provided crucial input and suggestions for the construction and implementation of this project. Thank you also to other research volunteers and the reviewers and editor of Managing Sport and Leisure who offered important and critical feedback for this project and manuscript development.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 When mentioning MLSE’s “well-known” image, this is in regard to its role in the Toronto region as an organization that not only offers a variety of professional sport events for the diverse population, but also – as a philanthropic foundation (i.e. MLSE Foundation) provides numerous grants to local NGOs and is well connected with the sport and physical activity field in the GTA, Ontario, and Canada. It is important to recognize that due to the thorough and significant support MLSE LP receives for its SFD and sport programming, not all SFD programs may be able to incorporate the extensive programming that they implement free-of-charge in most cases.

2 It is interesting to note that the largest ethnic group of members at MLSE LP is Black, however, no parents in the study who volunteered to participate were Black. While this is a limitation of the current study, future research conducted at MLSE LP will be focused on this particular demographic.