Promoting Adolescent Development Through Sports in Hong Kong: A Randomised Controlled Trial

Introduction

Physical activity is beneficial to all aspects of health, from physical fitness and metabolic control to mental and psychosocial well-being. These benefits are particularly important to children and adolescents as they are undergoing an active development and building up a foundation for their future success. Unfortunately, Hong Kong children are becoming less and less physically active. Data from government surveys in 2009 showed that only 34.2% of children aged 7 to 12 years had at least 60 minutes of moderate or vigorous activity five days a week over a 3 month period. Another recent survey reported that only 6.6% of secondary school students in Hong Kong met the WHO recommended standard of physical activity - 60 minutes of moderate and vigorous activity every day. In fact, 27.1% of adolescents did not even have moderate and vigorous physical activity in any days of the past week.

Upsurging adolescent problems have been identified in Hong Kong, including smoking, underage drinking, substance abuse, and the deterioration of mental well-being (D. T. Shek, 2006). Take mental health as an example. Mental health problems were estimated to affect 10 to 20% of children and adolescents worldwide (Kieling et al., 2011), resulting in short-term and long-term adverse consequences (Johnson, Roth, Schultz, & Breslau, 2006). Conventionally, mental health problems were tackled using a disease model, which focuses on disease treatment. However, it has been more recognised in recent decade that primary prevention would be important to improve the overall mental well-being of children and adolescents (Kieling et al., 2011).

Instead of the traditional disease model, strength-based positive prevention models has been called upon, where Positive Youth Development (PYDs) is one of the most successful one targeting adolescents. To understand the concept of PYD, it is important to have a glimpse at the traditional view of adolescence. The transition period located at the second decade of the human lifespan was conventionally regarded as the period of 'storm and stress' (Hall, 1904). It was suggested that adolescents often alternate between the extremes of sorrow and exuberance (N. Holt, 2008). Nonetheless, it was later recognised that the emphasis on these negative characteristics was disproportionately too much and a new perspective on adolescent development emerged. This new perspective is later named the PYD. Instead of the conventional deficit-reduction (or 'disease') approach, the PYD focuses on how to strengthen adolescents' internal and external asset so that problems could be prevented or alleviated. Since the establishment of this new concept in the 80s and 90s, a growing number of research has been conducted to investigate the actual implementation of such model.

The PYD model could be implemented in many context, but it is argued that sports and physical activity is one of the most suitable (Fraser-Thomas, Cote, & Deakin, 2005; Larson, 2000; Perkins & Noam, 2007). Actually such claim was consistent with the 'QK Blog', an existing adolescent strengthening platform (Kwai Tsing Safe Community and Healthy City Association, 2012). Nevertheless, the actual benefit of these sports-based PYD problem was rarely investigated, especially in China (Coakley, 2011; Fraser-Thomas et al., 2005). Therefore, we conducted the present project to promote two major aspects among adolescents in Hong Kong: physically activity and adolescent development.