Dr Richard Thelwell is undertaking research regarding expectations in sport and as such would like parents input to help.

Dear Football parent,

Although I am a Youth Football Team Manager (Castle United U13s who play in the Portsmouth Youth Football A League), the purpose of this email is to seek your support for a research project that I am conducting in my role as an academic at University of Portsmouth with a colleague (Dr Andrew Manley) at Leeds Beckett University.

Given the potential benefits to sporting participation, and football specific initiatives such as the RESPECT campaign, the Portsmouth Youth Football League, in addition to Hampshire FA are supporting the recruitment for our study by forwarding correspondence to all individuals on their email distribution list. Please can we also reassure you that the study has received a favorable ethical opinion from the respective institutional ethics committees.

In short, our research in recent years has focused on how individuals create impressions and expectations of others within a sporting environment (e.g., player v player, player v coach, coach v player) and we are now looking at how parents form perceptions of coaches, and how that affects their subsequent participation intentions on behalf of their children. This study will also extend the information available on the coach-parent interaction, how the interaction influences sporting involvement and participation, and how such a relationship can be managed. In addition to developing our previous work, we are hoping that the study will provide invaluable coach development and education material where we anticipate the outcomes to be of interest for coach focused governing bodies (e.g., SportsCoach UK) as well as sport specific bodies (e.g., The FA) given that parents are often very influential to their child's sporting involvement.

The study is conducted online and can be found by using the following link:

http://goo.gl/forms/M5v4UEJtzX


The study will require parents to do the following:

1. Complete some background study information (gender, age, relationship to the child, child’s level of sport, child’s age, child’s weekly volume of exercise and child’s primary activity).

2. Read a short web profile of a hypothetical coach prior to completing a short questionnaire based on their initial impression of the coach. Questionnaires will measure parental perceptions of coach competence, their intentions to recommend the coach, and the factors that influenced their judgments of the coach.

3. After completing the above, parents will be asked to read and complete a debrief form. They will then be asked again if they are satisfied and whether they permit their data to still be used.

May we thank you for taking the time to read this and we hope that your child's sporting involvement leads you to participate in the study.

With best wishes

Dr Richard Thelwell; PhD, CPsychol, HCPC, FBASES, SFHEA
Head of Department: Sport and Exercise Science
University of Portsmouth