A problem without a cause – New paper on the framing of causes & solutions in sport for development interventions

February 18, 2025

New paper co-authored by fellow SPIN member investigates agenda framing in the field of Sport for Development

Louis Moustakas, Professor for Sports Management and Sports Sociology at the University of Applied Sciences Kufstein (Austria) recently co-authored a paper together with Kelsey Slater, Educator and Researcher at North Dakota State University (USA), for the International Review for the Sociology of Sport.
The paper  examines how sport for development organizations frame social problems, their causes and the solutions they draw up in response to them.
You can access the paper, whose Abstract we are publishing below, through this link

Abstract

Critical examinations of the sport for development (SfD) field have highlighted concerns related to an emphasis on individual-level solutions and outcomes and the reinforcement of current neoliberal power structures. As such, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how SfD organisations use their annual reports to frame social problems, define the causes of those problems, the role of sport in crafting solutions to development problems, and make moral judgements related to their work in the SfD sector. Using framing theory as a framework, a qualitative content analysis of the annual reports from 2019 to 2021 of five prominent SfD organisations was conducted. The researchers used an open coding methodology to develop a codebook based on the four functions of framing: defining problems, identifying causes, determining solutions, and making moral judgements. The analysis revealed a lack of consistent salience of social problems except for the COVID-19 pandemic. The causes for these problems were largely ignored within the annual report documents; instead, organisations focused on the solutions they were working to implement. Solutions were framed primarily through the expansion or continuance of their active programming, bolstering the claim that their active SfD efforts are working.

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