Georgios Pavlogiannis, Inger Eliasson och Tor Söderström har skrivit en artikel i tidskriften "Young - Nordic Journal of Youth Research".
BildUlrika SahlénThe article is a scoping review about children’s rights in sports. The study has focused mostly on which topics (e.g., abuse, doping, selection) have been mainly investigated in relation to children’s rights and what research approaches (e.g., methods, sample, theories) have been employed for those investigations. However, the findings of the included studies are also part of the article via the three extensive tables. The study has focused on children’s rights as a whole, as a construct (e.g., UN Convention on the Rights of the Child; UNCRC) including only previous studies that explicitly mention “children’s rights” in their titles, abstracts or keywords.
Conducting research about children’s rights is always of great importance especially in sports, where previous research has highlighted several children’s rights violations. In Sweden, the topic is more up-to-date than ever, because except for ratifying the UNCRC in 1990 and including it in sports policy in 2009 (Idrotten Vill), Sweden made UNCRC an official law just 4 years ago. A scoping review focusing on children’s rights as a construct was needed in the field, since previous reviews focused specifically in sub-topics of children’s rights, such as abuse in sports. Moreover, previous reviews focused mostly on the findings of previous studies and not topics and research approaches.
Yes, this article is just the first part of my PhD work. There are empirical studies coming up. Data from 1200 coaches have been already collected via questionnaires and I am in the process of analysing them. Two additional empirical studies are being planned. A whole dissertation focused on children’s rights in sports will hopefully be done during 2026.
The results highlight indications of what has been done and how it has been done in research about children’s rights as a construct and suggest new possibly fruitful directions for future research. More specifically, the results showed that the included articles covered 17 topics in total, most frequently abuse. Few studies focused directly on children’s rights as construct, there were mostly descriptive, non-theoretical, and encompassed few countries, sports and ages. The empirical studies focused mostly on children as participants, which leads to an under-representation or non-representation of sample categories such as coaches, sports clubs’ representatives, federation representatives, parents etc… Based on those results, we suggest more explanatory and theoretical designs with clearer, direct focus on children’s rights, which would be beneficial for enhancing general and theoretical understanding of children’s rights and explaining associated problems.
I would say that the most surprising thing was the fact that a lot of important children’s sports topics, for example early specialization, were not identified in studies being connected to children’s rights constructs or there were only 1-2 studies doing that. It seems that researchers interested in abuse in sports are the ones who have connected their work to children’s rights the most and I would expect researchers from other children’s sports topics to have done the same.
As I said in the second question, I believe that researching children’s rights in sports is of great importance and I find it very exciting topic. I think that this scoping review was very important for my PhD work and needed for the field of children’s rights research. However, empirical studies are a bit more exciting, so I am looking forward to my future studies and articles.
Pavlogiannis, G., Eliasson, I., & Söderström, T. (2024). Exploring the landscape of children’s rights in sports : a scoping review of research topics and approaches in social sciences. Young - Nordic Journal of Youth Research. Epub ahead of print. https://doi.org/10.1177/11033088241226556
