Health promotion interventions in sports clubs – a mapping review

Background and purpose: The Ottawa Charter (1986) highlighted the importance of a settings-based approach to health promotion (HP), which has anchored in settings such as schools and cities, and has potential in areas such as... [ view full abstract ]

Background and purpose: The Ottawa Charter (1986) highlighted the importance of a settings-based approach to health promotion (HP), which has anchored in settings such as schools and cities, and has potential in areas such as sports clubs. Practice in the latter is ongoing but is not routinely captured in reviews due to limitations in study design.  Therefore the purpose of this review is to identify and map key strategies to develop interventions in sports clubs including published literature of all study designs. 

Methods: Mapping reviews are used to identify trends and gaps in new areas of research, often to commission future projects. A literature search was carried out between 1986 and 1st May 2017 in databases, e.g. Medline, SPORTdiscus, ERIC and PsycInfo. Examples of keywords were health promotion, sport clubs and intervention. The content was analyzed using a socio-ecological framework within the sports clubs setting that distinguishes different levels of interventions (intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional, community and policy), layers of the setting (micro, meso, macro) as well as targeted health behaviors, measurement used and facilitators or barriers.

Results: Of the 58 studies included in this review, almost half are from Australia. Publication date started in 1995, showing an increase in the number of articles over the years. The most targeted behaviors were alcohol followed by physical activity or sport participation. HP interventions in sports clubs are mostly focused on single health behaviors and also at targeting a single level of intervention in macro or micro layer. Only two studies used validated measures of HP.

Conclusions and implications: The settings approach to sports clubs is in its infancy but growing. Increased knowledge on HP interventions in sports clubs can help to prompt further studies but this must be supported by enhanced evaluation and the use of validated HP measurements.