El papel de los agentes sociales en la promoción de un deporte más educativo e igualitario: entrenadores/as y árbitros/as

Abstract

The sports context has the potential to foster personal development and social change. From this perspective, this doctoral thesis aims to advance towards a more educational and egalitarian sports context through the work with the social agents involved in it. The thesis includes the first and second parts, with an objective of promoting a more educational sport, and concludes with a third part focused on the promotion of equality in sport. The first part explores the role of coaches and officials in youth sports athletes' moral and psychosocial development. Two works are derived from this part, one academic article aimed at exploring the relationship between the contextual conditions generated by youth sport coaches and athletes' disposition to moral behaviour (Study 1); and a book chapter focused on synthesizing the existing evidence regarding officials' educational needs in youth sport (Study 2). The second part aims to transfer the empirical knowledge to the development of intervention programmes with social agents to promote positive outcomes in youth sports athletes. Two intervention programmes based on recent evidence and on the participants' and demanding organizations' specific needs were developed. One programme was aimed at enhancing coaches' knowledge and skills to optimize athletes' positive development (Study 3); the other aims to promote the educational role of youth sports officials (Study 4). The final part of the thesis arises from the need of promoting equality in the sports context through increasing the visibility of women coaches' professional careers. The work derived from this part has the purpose of exploring the individual and contextual characteristics influencing women's coaching trajectories (Study 5). Globally, the results of this thesis suggest that the coach-created motivational climate has an influence on young football players' predisposition to behave positively in terms of moral development. Young football players tend to evaluate as morally appropriate behaviours that are actually negative for their moral development due to the influence of professional sport, which considers those behaviours acceptable and inherent to competition. In consequence, being aware of this relation is insufficient to produce a change and specific interventions are needed to clarify the meaning of moral development and how youth sports coaches can promote it. The results from the intervention programmes with youth sport coaches and officials emphasize the importance of developing evidence-based practices, offering specific strategies, and adapting to the needs of participants from the design to the implementation of the interventions. Additionally, it is essential to incorporate the work with other agents (e. g. , families) and to raise awareness and recognize the potential of officials as educational agents, as well as calling attention to the need of including a gender perspective to understand the reality of women coaches. The results from the last part evidence a lack of career maps acknowledging the specificities of women's coaching careers. Moreover, results suggest a variety of factors at diverse contextual levels that influence the different stages of women's careers, mainly hindering their progress to top-level positions. The practical implications derived from this thesis focus on offering strategies to promote a more educational sport through the work with social agents, and specific actions to support the development of women coaches' professional careers to promote equality in sport.

Date of Award	1 Apr 2022
Original language	Spanish
Supervisor	Yago Ramis Laloux (Director) & Susana Pallares Parejo (Director)