A troubling number of school-aged children experience mental health problems that negatively impact wellbeing and performance across social, emotional, and academic domains (Cook, Burns, Browning-Wright & Gresham, 2010). Research shows that roughly one in five children between ages 6- and 20-years of age experience a diagnosable mental health issue (Costello, Mustillo, Erkanali, Keeler, & Angold, 2003). To combat mental health problems, children must exercise effective coping skills, such as resilience, a form of social-emotional skills. These skills do not develop automatically and require explicit teaching. An effective approach to teach children resilience skills is through a universal prevention intervention (Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor & Shelling, 2011; Pahl & Barrett, 2010). To ensure access to such interventions, researchers have recommended implementing universal interventions where children already exist (Cobham, 2012; Hudson & Dodd, 2012; Kazdin, 2008; Kazdin & Blase, 2011). One such context is that of sport. Upwards of 30 million school-age youth (ages 6-19 years) participate in organized youth sport in and out of school settings. Additionally, sport includes a necessary ingredient for cultivating resilience skills, adversity (Pahl & Barrett, 2010). This study examined the effectiveness of implementing a resilience curriculum in the sport context.
Method:
Participants included 41 female and 37 male rowers aged 13 – 18 years (M = 15.88). Researchers implemented a pre-post experimental design using quantitative methods (Creswell, 2007). The measures to determine the effectiveness of the Resilience in Sport curriculum were: 1) The Perceived Stress Scale (Cohen, Kamarck & Mermelstein, 1983); 2) a modified General Self- Efficacy Scale (Schwarzer & Jerusalem, 1995); and The Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener, Emmons, Larson, & Griffin, 1985).
Analysis/Results:
Participants reported increases in perceived self-efficacy in sport (p = . 015) and perceived life satisfaction (p = .014) and decreases in perceived stress (p = .015) that were statistically significant.
Conclusions:
Findings from the present study are promising, lending initial support for using the sport context as a forum for universal prevention interventions. Leveraging sport to foster resilience skills and combat the personal and societal harm of mental illness is imperative. Any way researchers can identify ways to help youth thrive in the face of adversity should be considered and sport has shown itself to be a powerful context within which resilience skills can grow. Ultimately, these are skills that can help young people succeed on the field of play and for the rest of their lives.