Sam Thrower

Oxford Brookes University · Department of Sport and Health Sciences

In this chapter, we provide an overview of Crisis Decision Theory (CDT), as well as the concept of athlete vulnerability, within the context of doping in sport. Specifically, we look at the decisions athletes make about doping, or about following clean sport behaviour, and why. In doing so, we highlight the vulnerability concept followed by the mos...

Young athletes have become an increasingly important client group for sport psychology practitioners and a population whose physical, cognitive, emotional, and social development should be carefully considered by a practitioner when delivering their services (Visek et al., 2009). The aim of this British Psychological Society (BPS) Division of Sport...

For over a decade, researchers have been examining parental stress and coping within the context of youth sport. However, studies have overlooked the crucial associations between stressors, appraisals, emotions, and coping, highlighting the need for more sophisticated and innovative research designs to examine the transactional nature of stress. Th...

Values-based education seeks to cultivate personal responsibility, empathy, and integrity to encourage critical reflection on the (anticipated or actual) consequences of one’s choices and behaviours. To comply with the World Anti-Doping Agency’s International Standard for Education, anti-doping education programmes must incorporate values-based com...

Research exploring the processes and effects of parent-child social interaction in youth sport has been limited by an overreliance on retrospective questionnaire and interview-based designs. The purpose of the current study was to examine the naturally occurring parent-child interactions which unfold during the post-competition car journey within B...

Although applied sport psychologists are supporting young athletes drawing on experiential evidence of what works, there is a lack of understanding regarding how to effectively help young athletes enhance their wellbeing, long-term development, and performance. The aim of the current study was to gain insights into the consultancy process from accr...

Studies investigating competitive bodybuilding have primarily done so from a pathologizing perspective, and have often considered aspects of the competitive bodybuilding lifestyle in isolation, therefore overlooking the broader motivations underlying individuals’ engagement in the sport. The current study addressed these limitations by using a meta...

The purpose of the current study was to utilize the RE-AIM (i.e., reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation, and maintenance) framework to evaluate the national-level scale-out of the Lawn Tennis Association’s “Optimal Competition Parenting Workshop” (OCPW) across a 4-year period. During 2018, 65 workshops were run across the United Kingdom, 1...

While important for athletic development and well-being in youth sport, knowledge remains limited around the processes underpinning triadic relationships between parents, athletes, and coaches. This study aimed to examine the relational processes that drive the functioning of parent–athlete–coach triads across three developmental stages of youth te...

Interest in the value of sport as a vehicle for promoting positive developmental outcomes for children and young athletes has been longstanding in youth sport psychology research. However, there has been a more evident surge in research over the past 20 years that lies adjacent to more global, public health and well-being concerns over the integrit...

Protecting clean sport, and the rights of athletes to a clean sport environment, is at the centre of anti-doping policies. To better support and enable clean athletes and sport, an understanding of the clean athlete lifeworld is required. The current study explored the ways that clean athletes are personally affected by others’ actual or suspected...

Background: Agents, race-organisers, and sponsors have a key influence in shaping the world of elite professional distance running. Yet to date this important but hard-to reach stakeholder group has been omitted from the global research landscape of doping and anti-doping. The purpose of this study is to address this gap in the literature and explo...

Have you noticed how you can feel very confident in some sporting situations but in others, usually at the worst possible moment, that confidence can suddenly disappear? When athletes feel confident, they are focused on the task, feel relaxed, and commit fully to decisions—all of which help them perform well. However, when they do not feel confiden...

Background : Patient-physician interactions involve complex interplays between patient and physician autonomy. This is intensified in stigmatised populations, such as anabolic-androgenic steroid (AAS) users. The current study investigated what factors influence clinical interactions between physicians and AAS users, thus providing a holistic unders...

There remains limited research into the role that parents play to support their child’s psychosocial development within elite youth sport contexts. The present study was conducted in an English professional youth football (soccer) academy that has intentionally integrated the 5Cs framework (Harwood; commitment, communication, concentration, control...

Research exploring the processes and effects of parent-child social interaction in youth sport has been limited by an overreliance on retrospective questionnaire and interview-based designs. The purpose of the current study was to examine the naturally occurring parent-child interactions which unfold during the pre-competition car journey within Br...

Background: Although a precise percentage of athletes doping has remained elusive, evidence to date suggest that the majority of athletes are ‘clean’. Protecting clean sport, and the rights of athletes to a clean sport environment, is at the centre of anti-doping policies. To better support and enable clean athletes and sport, an understanding of t...

Background: Doping has been a prominent issue for the sport of athletics in recent years. The endurance disciplines, which currently account for 56% of the global anti-doping rule violations in athletics, appear to be particularly high risk for doping. Objective: Using this high-risk, high-pressure context, the main purpose of this study was to inv...

Little research exists on the lived experiences of female anabolic-androgenic steroid (AAS) use from a harm reduction perspective. This study aims to address this gap and explore the experiences, perceptions, and perspectives of AAS-using females through their journeys of starting, using, and coming off AAS to facilitate appropriate public health p...

A fundamental step in describing a research field is the review and synthesis of accumulated knowledge. Multiple qualitative reviews have been conducted over the last decade to provide a summary and commentary on the growing literature in the area of youth sport parenting. However, these reviews have focused on contemporary findings in the field, l...

Background In sport the narrative is changing from anti-doping to pro-clean sport. Yet, our understanding of what ‘clean sport’ means to athletes is notably absent from the literature. Objectives Working together with elite athletes and National Anti-Doping Organisations (NADOs), this study explored the meaning and importance of ‘clean sport’ and...

In this study, we give voice to athletes and explore what ‘clean’ means for them in elite sport. Working together with elite athletes and National Anti-Doping Organisations (NADOs) in five European countries, we investigated the meaning and importance of ‘clean sport’ and ‘clean athlete identity’ from the athletes’ perspectives. With athletes as co...

Studies have highlighted the stressful nature of youth sport for parents and young athletes and the negative impact this can have on their experiences and involvement. However, there is growing evidence to suggest that stressful and adverse events have the potential to facilitate long-term growth. In this chapter, we explore the individual and shar...

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to examine the naturally occurring parent-child interactions which occur before, during, and after tennis competitions. Background: Although considerable academic attention has focused on parent-child interactions before, during, and after competitions in youth sport (see Harwood et al., 2019), there...

The current study investigated psychological stress among parents of competitive British tennis players. Adopting a multipart concurrent mixed method design, 135 British tennis parents completed a cross sectional online questionnaire to examine their primary appraisals, emotions, and coping strategies associated with self-disclosed stressors. Hiera...

The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive narrative review of extant scientific knowledge on the effectiveness of performance-enhancement based interventions within youth sport settings. Specifically, we explore the effects of psychological interventions on the sport performance of young athletes (18 years of age or under). Drawing upon o...

This study provided an original contribution to the literature by examining elite early adolescent academy soccer players sport-confidence needs. Pre-interview booklets and individual semi-structured interviews were used as multiple sources of qualitative data to identify the types, sources, and debilitating factors of sport-confidence in a large s...

The purpose of this article is to review and critique the literature in youth sport that specifically relates to parental influence on the experiences and psychosocial development of young athletes. First, we consider the literature examining the extent to which parental involvement in organised youth sport has been associated with psychosocial out...

Confidence has been recognized as a critical psychological characteristic influencing the development of elite sports performance, with a number of studies associating high levels of confidence with a range of desirable cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses (e.g., Hays,

This paper presents a series of studies that progresses the development and validation of the Parent-Initiated Motivational Climate in Individual Sport Competition Questionnaire (MCISCQ-Parent). Study 1 examined the face and content validity of an initial pool of 26 items based on the principles of achievement goal theory and prior research. In Stu...

Background 2,4-Dinitrophenol (2,4-DNP) is an effective but highly dangerous fat burner, not licensed for human consumption. Death cases reported for 2,4-DNP overdose, particularly among young adults, have raised concerns about the ineffective regulatory control, lack of education and risks associated with impurity, and the unknown concentration of...

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a novel online education program for British tennis parents and their experiences of engaging in the program. Using a convergent parallel mixed- methods design, 13 parents completed pre- and post-program online questionnaires, while a subset of 9 participants also shared their experiences via an asynchronou...

Despite academic interest in sport parenting, there is a lack of published intervention research with this population (Harwood & Knight, 2015). Researchers in the UK (Thrower et al. 2016) and US (e.g. Dorsch et al. 2016) have recently engaged sport parent education programmes. Although initial findings have been encouraging, these studies highlight...

This study examined the effectiveness of an evidence-based sport parent education programme designed to meet the stage-specific needs of British tennis parents. Using an organisational action research framework, six workshops were run over a 12-week period for tennis parents with children between the ages of 5 and 10 years. Workshops took place in...

The purpose of this study was to identify British tennis parents’ education and support needs across contexts and developmental stages. Data were collected in 2 high-performance tennis centers and consisted of 6 months of fieldwork and interviews with parents, coaches, and ex-youth players (n = 29). Using a grounded theory methodology (Corbin & Str...

There currently exists an in-­‐depth empirical understanding of parental involvement in junior tennis. Despite this, published intervention studies are conspicuous by their absence in the literature (Harwood & Knight, 2012). This has led to recent calls to encourage applied researchers, practitioners and sports organizations to use this body of lit...

The parent-related research in youth sport has provided numerous recommendations of how parents could benefit from education and support. However, although these recommendations have offered guidance for potential interventions, no studies have specifically set out to identify parents’ educational and support needs within a specific sport organizat...

This presentation focuses on an educational process for tennis parents during players’ early adolescence (age 10-14 years). The educational process is taken from a study which identified British tennis parents’ education and support needs across contexts and developmental stages.This study used a grounded theory methodology (Corbin & Strauss, 2008)...