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Evaluating the London 2012 Games’ impact on sport participation in a non-hosting region: a practical application of realist evaluation

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posted on 2016-04-08, 12:44 authored by Shushu Chen, Ian Henry
In the literature on Olympic legacies and impacts, there is a dearth of materials that specifically address the issue of Olympic impact for non-hosting regions. The literature tends to deal with impacts at a national level, or at a hosting-city region level, neglecting in large part the degree to which benefits can be leveraged by non-hosting regions. A further limitation identified in the literature is a failure to engage in detailed formal evaluation of policy implementation where assertions of potential policy impact are based on untested assumptions. This study is intended to address both of these concerns. It presents an empirical, ‘bottom-up’ application of a Realist Evaluation framework to assess the impact of a policy initiative – Workplace Challenge – aimed at leveraging enhanced sports participation in a non-hosting region – Leicestershire – in the period leading up to the 2012 Games. In doing so, it seeks to identify which causal mechanisms worked within this particular context to produce the observed outcomes. The evaluation results demonstrate that the programme represented a positive approach to fostering regular engagement with sport and physical activities for some groups in some types of organisations, and that awareness and motivational factors associated with the London 2012 Games are, in this case, linked (albeit weakly) to an increase in sport and physical activity participation for specific groups taking part in the programme in particular organisational contexts.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

Leisure Studies

Volume

35

Issue

5

Pages

685-707

Citation

CHEN, S. and HENRY, I., 2015. Evaluating the London 2012 Games’ impact on sport participation in a non-hosting region: a practical application of realist evaluation. Leisure Studies, 35 (5), pp. 685-707.

Publisher

© Taylor & Francis

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2015-01-13

Publication date

2015-05-18

Copyright date

2016

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Leisure Studies on 18/05/2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/02614367.2015.1040827.

ISSN

0261-4367

eISSN

1466-4496

Language

  • en