Abstract
BACKGROUND: Sport-for-development (SFD) aims to use implicit features of sport (such as leadership, teamwork, and communication) to improve non-sport-related outcomes, including physical health, physical literacy, mental health, and social competency. Recent reviews show that youth-based SFD programs can positively impact youth development. However, SFD programming often takes place in a living lab, where evaluation occurs in an ecologically valid yet dynamic setting that makes outcome measurement challenging. Our goal was to conduct a review that collates data on outcome measures used in SFD living lab environments to assess physical health, physical literacy, mental health, and social competency. In doing so, our review aims to identify and characterize outcome measures that have been previously used for evaluating SFD programming in a living lab setting. METHODS: Our review was guided by the Arksey and O’Malley framework for scoping reviews. To identify relevant articles, we performed a search of 5 academic databases and 2 grey literature repositories. Our inclusion criteria required articles to discuss youth, sport, living labs, and development (with respect to physical health, physical literacy, mental health, and/or social competency). No restrictions were placed on study design or on year of publication. Only English-language articles were included. RESULTS: We identified 1493 studies, of which 8 were ultimately included in our scoping review. Study designs varied from case-series to randomized trials and sample sizes ranged from 4 to 1749. We found that SFD researchers rely heavily on existing questionnaires that were not developed for use in living labs, often adapting these scales to suit contextual needs. Such ad hoc adaptation is typically not accompanied by outcome measure validation. CONCLUSIONS: To date, there are few valid outcome measures to evaluate SFD programming in living lab settings. Research is needed to develop such outcome measures to better understand the impact of SFD programming as its presence continues to grow. SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION: Our review was registered in the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/awgsj/) prior to data extraction and analysis.