“What is the score?” A review of football-based public mental health interventions

Journal of Public Mental Health,Volume 16, Issue 4, Page 144-158, December 2017. Purpose Football exercise as an intervention for people with severe mental health problems has seen an increasing interest in the past years. To date, there is, however, no comprehensive review of the empirical evidence regarding the effectiveness of these interventions. In this review, the authors have comprised the research findings from the peer-review literature as well as the theoretical approaches to football exercise as an adjunct treatment. This overview will be informative to everybody who is planning to develop a football intervention for this population as well as to the people who are preparing evaluation studies that measure the effectiveness of such interventions. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The authors identified research papers in the peer-review literature that feature empirical findings on “football interventions” that aim at improving mental and/or physical well-being in participants with mental health problems. The authors are using the term “football intervention” here in the sense that the participants actively took part in football exercise, so the authors excluded studie s in which the participants only watched football or used football as a metaphor to discuss mental health problems. In a table, the authors indicate the definition of the target group, targeted outcomes, measured outcomes, form and frequency of the interven...
Source: Journal of Public Mental Health - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research