Youth leaders’ representations about the role of youth organizations in physical activity promotion

Purpose. Multisectorial actions are needed to fight against sedentariness. Youth organizations (YO) gather thousands of children and adolescents each weekend. Most of them propose to develop all dimensions of the individuals and to contribute to the education of the youth. Unfortunately, very few studies are available to confirm if this is the case. The purpose of this study was to determine if the youth leaders consider that they play a role in physical activity (PA) promotion. Methods. A questionnaire was developed and tested by a pilot study. It comprised four parts (Introduction, Descriptive variables; Youth leader’s representations about PA; Youth leader’s representations about the role of the YO in PA promotion). Most of the questions were Lickert scales. Answers of 232 youth leaders were analysed. They were belonging to all youth movements of the Liege area. Results. Youth leaders tended to support the idea that YO have to play a role in PA promotion: 57.3% totally agree on the fact that YO allows youth to be physically active; 40.1% consider that it is effectively the case. On the other hand, only 1.3% believes that their group attend to sports during YO’s activities and 4.7% that youth use what they learn about PA in YO in their everyday life. Conclusions
This study emphasized that YO should be more involved as an determining actor in the overall PA promotion and that youth leaders should be more systematically informed and prepared about the potential role that they could play.