“Play for change”. Some outputs of the participative evaluation research

Recent studies show that sport is one of the leisure activities through which it is easier to engage the so called “hard-to-reach youth” (Haudenhuysea et al., 2014).This presentation aims to showcase the evaluation research on a sport program involving at risk children in an Italian metropolitan area from 2014 to 2016. The program involved 113 youths (95% male; average age: 14.2; 25 % foreigners) attending multi-sport activities. They were monitored by a multi-professional team (coach, educator and a sport psychologist) in two weekly training sessions and twice/month laboratory activities (cooking, mosaic, video making). Through these activities the program aimed at: developing participants’ motivation to sport, growing their sense of selfefficacy; developing the occasion for young boys and girls to create positive relationships with peers and significant adults; creating and implementing a social network starting form the soccer clubs. This work presents how the participative evaluation research contributed to continuously redefine the program itself and understand its real impact. Using a longitudinal multi-method approach we collected 113 questionnaires exploring athletes’ representation of and motivation to sport and their sense of self-efficacy; 32 semistructured interviews to social and sport workers; 16 observation sections of sport activities (creating an adhoc observation grid). The interviews analysis shows that the participative approach helped in the redefinition of the project actions starting from the stakeholders’ point of view. The interviews analysis also highlights a positive evaluation of team cohesion and the creation of new social relations starting from the soccer club and involving territorial associations, municipality services, youth centers. The questionnaires results show a rise of young’s motivation to sport practice; finally, the observations point out an increase of adults’ integration in their work with youngsters.