The Question

What benefits and challenges do young people from lower-income and ethnically diverse backgrounds experience with sport?

How can we engage and break down barriers through an understanding different perspectives and applying behaviour change theory?

The Approach

We designed a questionnaire which captured young people’s attitudes and behaviours, past experiences and feelings towards sport, media and other activities, their opportunities and role models and motivators and barriers.

1000 young people aged 13-24 from low-income households shared their answers with us. By running segmentation analysis on this data, we identified 7 distinct sporting personalities. We ran in depth follow up interviews with a selection of each group to make sure our descriptions truly represented the real motivators and challenges of young people. From this detailed analysis we designed pen portraits to bring each segment to life and created a behaviour change strategy that was bespoke to each group

The Impact

Our insight and strategy has been shared by Street Games with organisations and those working in the sports sector across the U.K through a comms launch and a series of webinars to help grow understanding about the needs and motivations amongst this audience.

Building on from this dissemination phase, StreetGames used our recommendations to create cohorts of interested partners wishing to achieve ‘test & learn’ approaches and undertake workforce training.

The findings continue to be used to update StreetGames training workshops and create new guides and resources, undertake further advocacy and fundraising to secure more resources for this work.