Participatory approaches to understanding community sport, leisure and wellbeing in the lives of young people from refugee backgrounds

Abstract

This qualitative study was a three-year long collaboration with young people, staff, and partners at BelongHere1, a refugee charity, in London, UK and utilized participatory action research (PAR) to explore how young people from refugee backgrounds understand community sport, leisure, and wellbeing in their lives. PAR is a strength-based methodology that engages community partners in collaborative research to identify and act upon locally-driven issues. After nine months of formative partnership work, the stakeholders, young people, and I co-designed/implemented various aspects of the research process. With the research focus framed around the co-creation of a sport, leisure, and wellbeing program at BelongHere, researcher-driven qualitative methods and youth-driven participatory methods were employed to examine the complexities of PAR and explore how the young people experienced and understood the program. Data was analyzed in three stages using reflective thematic analysis, framework analysis, and reflexive thematic analysis and research findings were represented across three papers. Paper one found that using PAR with young people from refugee backgrounds was rife with complexities and that developing trusting, reciprocal, and ethical relationships was fundamental to the integrity, effectiveness, and outcomes of PAR. Paper two found that the young people had a wealth of intersecting capabilities that framed their wellbeing and these were negotiated, harnessed, and occasionally restricted through the program. Last, paper three found that the young people made sense of youth-led social action through their emotions, complex relational dynamics, and cultural and religious values. However, meanings and experiences were also shaped through political ideologies and power dynamics. This thesis makes novel methodological, conceptual, and theoretical contributions and offers timely recommendations to sport/ leisure practitioners who work alongside young forced migrants, as well as to policymakers tasked with making decisions around salient issues that impact the lives of young people from refugee backgrounds.