To develop environmental approaches to improving health in community sports clubs.

An exciting opportunity has arisen for a fully funded, inter-disciplinary PhD studentship supported by Stirling’s world-renowned Institute for Social Marketing & Health and Division of Sport. Funded by the University of Stirling, this studentship is designed to lead to a new programme of research in parallel with and beyond the PhD, thus providing excellent prospects of post-doctoral employment. The successful student will be one of 3+ being recruited together into the university’s new Health and Wellbeing PhD cluster (https://www.stir.ac.uk/research/research-degrees/institute-for-advanced-studies-studentships/health-and-wellbeing/). Each student will be supported by established academics and peers, in a nurturing and dynamic interdisciplinary environment.

Community sports clubs have long been recognised as settings in which there are opportunities to improve the health of those involved in the club, and several models and toolkits have been developed including that of the ‘Health Promoting Sports Club’ (HPSC). Within these models, much of the focus is on clubs delivering health promotion or behaviour change activities to support members to adopt a healthier lifestyle. A key barrier to clubs delivering this is a lack of time and resources. The HPSC model also includes recognition of the importance of a healthy environment, but relatively little attention has been paid to supporting community clubs to deliver that. More generally, the most effective measures to reduce consumption of unhealthy commodities tend to be upstream, systems-level interventions, which could translate in clubs, for example, to smoke-free or vape-free policies, reduced branding/marketing of unhealthy commodities, financial inclusion policies, or avoiding unhealthy norms. These have yet to be explored, particularly in a UK context.

We expect this studentship would involve: 

·      A review of relevant literature to understand current models and approaches, with an emphasis on environmental drivers of health.

·      Engagement with and observations at a diverse selection of community sports clubs in Scotland to identify current drivers, norms, approaches, interests and opportunities.

·      Preliminary development and scoping of feasibility and acceptability of a toolkit-style intervention to address environmental drivers of health in community sports clubs.

We anticipate that this studentship would lead to parallel and subsequent grant application opportunities, for example, to further develop and test a toolkit in a pilot or full randomised controlled trial; to evaluate novel interventions for individual club members/families around health checks; to develop and evaluate an accreditation process for clubs as healthy environments; or to explore policy options for sport's governing bodies and/or governments. The successful student, where they are capable, may have the opportunity to work on these projects during the PhD or as a named post-doctoral researcher when their PhD is complete.

The supervisory team will be led by Dr. Richard Purves, Institute for Social Marketing and Health with two other cluster members (to be confirmed on appointment). All studentships will also have access to advice from the wider academic cluster and overseen by the cluster management team (Prof. Anna Whittaker, Dr. Rachel O’Donnell and Prof. Niamh Fitzgerald).