Purdy, LG and Lang, M (2024) Imagining sport in Lithuania: Young Athletes’ views on Safe Sport. European Journal for Sport and Society. pp. 1-18. ISSN 1613-8171

Text Imagining Sport in Lithuania.pdf - Accepted Version Restricted to Repository staff only until 4 October 2025. Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (593kB)

Abstract

Sports organisations have a moral and legal duty of care to deliver sport in a safe environment and to promote the welfare of athletes. This right to what has become known as ‘safe sport’ is now firmly established on the global policy agenda. Simultaneously, there is growing understanding of the need to engage with athletes, including those who are children and young people, and involve them in safe sport developments and research to ensure initiatives are effective and (child-) athlete-centred. However, to date most developments and research in this area have excluded athletes. The project presented here, in which researchers delivered a series of workshops on safe sport topics to current youth high-performance athletes in Lithuania, aimed to explore youth athletes’ views on the safe sport issues they consider most relevant to sport in their nation. Using a qualitative case study approach, data were generated through focus group interviews with 17 Lithuanian undergraduate student-athletes (average age 22) from sport-related degrees. Analysis identified doping, overtraining, emotional/psychological abuse, and corruption as the issues the young athletes consider most pertinent to their sporting lives. The project highlights the importance of working with current youth athletes to understand the issues they consider important to their experience to better enable sport policymakers and educators to develop relevant and meaningful safe sport training.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in European Journal for Sport and Society on 04/04/24, available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/16138171.2024.2335574
Uncontrolled Keywords:	athlete participation; athlete rights; child/youth athlete voice; Lithuania; safe sport; 1506 Tourism
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GV Recreation Leisure > GV561 Sports
Divisions:	Liverpool Business School
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
SWORD Depositor:	A Symplectic
Date Deposited:	17 Jan 2024 10:37
Last Modified:	11 Apr 2024 14:30
DOI or ID number:	10.1080/16138171.2024.2335574
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/22300

View Item