Community sports programmes as a means of reducing violence and antisocial behaviour in young people in London: A mixed-methods approach to maximising

Background: Reports of knife crime have put youth violence on the agenda.

As well as the victims, there are wider impacts on a community, with many living in physically-threatening and unsafe environments.

While experiences of poverty and deprivation increase risks, other well-established risk factors are being male and being from a minoritised ethnic group.

Externalising (aggression) but also co-occurring internalising (anxiety) behaviours are often precursors; this is also predicted by negative peer relationships and poor emotion regulation and social cognitive abilities. Many prevention programmes are delivered in schools, often in neighbourhoods at greater risk.

However these schools are also under pressure to deliver an intensive curriculum with fewer resources. Situating programmes in community settings is an attractive alternative.

Community sports programmes offer not only mental and physical benefits of physical activity, but also learning skills (improving self-confidence/self-esteem) and social activities (improving social skills increasing social connections). Other advantages are: they are low threshold, financially accessible, and usually in safe environments.

Organised locally, they may also be a powerful tool to reach socially-disadvantaged groups. Football is particularly valued among young people, and Premier League football clubs are highly aspirational.

A competitive team sport like football teaches young people about working with others and how to manage extreme emotions (frustration, anger) and difficult interpersonal situations (conflict, confrontations). Outreach football programmes run by Premier League clubs are likely to be meaningful.

In order for us to leverage this to prevent youth violence, we need to know more about whether and how sports engagement targets the risks. Aims: This project will use innovative study designs and mixed methods.

We will test whether sport participation is associated with externalising behaviours and other antedencts of violent behaviours.

We propose to do this in children in East London, stradling boroughs with crime rates far higher than the national average and the highest child poverty levels in the country.

Proposed methods: Study 1 will use test concurrent and prospective associations between self-reported sports participation and externalising behaviours and risk factors (co-occurring internalising behaviours, negative peer relationships, poor emotion regulation and poor social cognitive abilities). These analyses will build on a longitudinal cohort study (DEER study) funded by Barts Charity.

Data at baseline from 800 children, aged 7-10-years from primary schools around East London have already been collected, and by the time of the PhD, Wave 1 will also have been collected.

Data includes a self-reported measure of participation in sports and other leisure activities as well as self, parent and teacher reported externalising and internalising behaviours.

Data from experimental tasks measured emotion regulation abilities and social cognition (including the processing of and responses to ambiguous hostile cues, advanced theory of mind, and reading social emotions in others/situations).

We will use cross-lagged panel models to explore concurrent and longitudinal associations between sports participation and our outcome variables.

Exploratory analysis can compare the extent to which these associations vary by demographic characteristics (gender, ethnicity) to see what impacts on whom.

Study 2 will assess short-term associations between device-measured physical activity (ActiGraph accelerometers) and fluctuations in externalising and internalising behaviours (gathered using Experience Sampling Methods, ESM).

Using ESM prompts, children will also be asked to report on any negative social interactions and complete short trials of emotion regulation and social cognition tasks. Fifty children (7-10) years on a week long WHUF football camp ("Holiday Hammers"