The research presents the theoretical findings in the area of sports as the biopsychosocial, health, and educational factors in the development stage of adolescence. It empirically focuses on the study of the role and importance of sport activities for the youth who are temporarily living outside their core family, namely in group homes.
The theoretical part describes the connection between the physical and sport activities and the socialization throughout the development stages of childhood and adolescence. The stages are intertwined with family ties. Furthermore, we focus on the possibilities of negative family dynamics and introduce the risk factors for the development of emotional and behavioural difficulties for the youth. With the presentation of aetiologal and phenomenological theories, we introduce the emotional and behavioural difficulties of children and adolescents, about which we are learning today, evaluating, and trying to understand their progress and respond to them accordingly with the social-pedagogical diagnostics. Following that, we describe which of the development, family, and social factors contribute to placing individuals in a care outside their family (youth home, group homes and residential institutions). We studied the care worker's relational role and the range of operation of educational forms. We placed the use of physical and sport activities alongside other educational approaches, reviewed the motivational concepts, which are useful for understanding the participation in sport activities, and focused on the effects of sports on the physical and psychosocial balance of the youth.
By using qualitative research on the basis of five partly structured interviews with care workers and five interviews with the selected young individuals from various group homes in Slovenia, the empirical part of the study provides the evaluation of the care workers about their role in encouraging and organising such activities as well as the opinions of the youth about the significance and influence of sport activities on their development and experience. We tried to determine what methods, ways, and forms of work the care workers use in this area, what motives of the youth are of key importance to participate in sports, and what obstacles both face. We made a comparison between the care workers' evaluation and the evaluation of the youth as well as demonstrated positive effects on various areas of an adolescent's activity: physical, emotional, mental and social. On the basis of the acquired evaluations and experiences as well as on the existing methodical solutions, we formed the guidelines for physical and sport activities for the youth in the area of education outside their families. Moreover, we formed a draft for the methodical model on encouraging the youth with emotional and behavioural difficulties to participate in regular physical and sport activities.
The acquired results confirm the reasonableness of the use of physical and sport activities as a part of the educational method in the area of education of children and youth with emotional and behavioural difficulties in group homes.
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