Parental Influence in Youth Sport

Youth sport has become one of the most popular outlets for children in today’s society. Youth sport programs and organizations play an important role in the lives of the children that are participating. Many aspects go into, what would be considered, a successful delivery of sports (Barcelona & Young, 2010). Moreover, this includes coaches and parent’s influences and when it contributes to a positive experience (Barcelona & Young, 2010). However, one of the biggest contributions to a positive or negative sport experience, is the role of parental influence. The culture around youth sports has changed in multiple ways throughout the years. It has started to diminish and one of the reasons that has contributed to this decrease in participation is parents (Rosenwald, 2015). Children are deciding not to play sports anymore because of the pressure that coexists with playing at a young age. Parents and adults within these programs take the competiveness to another lever and forget the real reason why adolescents want to play. The purpose of this research was to study the relationship of the feelings that former youth athletes have about their sport and how parental influence played a role in their experiences. Furthermore, looking into how former youth athletes feel about sport participation as adults. An abundant amount of research has been conducted to find the benefits, as well as the risks, of participating in sports at a young age and how parents fit into the equation. However, where the research lacks, is in how parent’s involvement has an influence on how children feel about sport in the long run. The objective of this research was to examine if this type of relationship exists within youth sport culture. This research can be beneficial to various parties that are involved in youth sports and the organizations. It allows parents to understand how their actions can have a lasting impression on their children. As well as, allowing children and young adults understand why parents might do certain things when it comes to youth sport. Understanding this type of relationship can help youth programs adjust how they teach children. This can also help structure programs to ensure a positive environment and allowing parents to understand when their influence is necessary or not necessary. The purpose of this study was to research the current relationship between parental influence in youth sport and how it plays into the feelings former youth athletes have on sport. The research question of this study was: What relationship does parental influence in youth sport have with the feeling former youth sport athletes have about sport participation as adults? The intention of this research was to gain a better understanding of how the experience of youth sport combined with parental influence can influence a former youth athlete of their feelings on playing sport as adults. Many factors go into understanding youth sport and the culture that surrounds it. To comprehend this research, there has to be background knowledge on the purpose of youth sport, an understanding of the factors that play a role in youth sport, and the state of youth sport today

One Financial Education Intervention, Two Performances, What Happened?

It is often expected that one financial education intervention should offer similar performance in changing financial behaviour to determine its role in social marketing. Behaviour change takes time and it needs different approaches to different segmentations. It involves multifaceted aspects and cannot always be controlled by the organisers. If the performances of an intervention are not consistent, should we reject or endorse it? This paper takes a critical view of the application of social marketing mix concepts from 4Ps and segmentation in designing and assessing the impact of a financial education intervention. The short course “Managing My Money” (the MMM) was designed and delivered through direct and online channels. Using the dataset from a large research project of the True Potential Centre for the Public Understanding of Finance (PUFin) at the Open University in co-operation with the Coventry University, funded by the Money Advice Service’s What Works Fund. There were diversified experiments to explore the impact of one financial education intervention which distributed to specific target audiences in different places. This seeks to explore what works and does not work for different populations in improving their personal financial behaviours including saving and borrowing. This paper selected the datasets of 438 members of New Central Credit Union (NCCU) from 1953 NCCU members and 1257 members of Coventry District Credit Union (CDCU) from 1322 CDCU members who lived in Coventry and categorised into neighbourhood segmentation by wards. The purpose is to explore how a specific neighbourhood environment might influence individual saving and borrowing behaviour. Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) was used to design the experiment and to assess the impact of the intervention toward saving and borrowing behaviours among the control and experimental group. The experimental group received either face-to-face intervention at a workshop or printed materials and an online course, while the control group did not receive any of these treatments. This paper offers a case study to explain why one financial education intervention does not always offer the repeated performance through the lens of social marketing. Some findings are useful to social marketers and educators, in the use and evaluation of a financial education intervention, to promote desirable saving and borrowing behaviours. Changing borrowing behaviour is more multifaceted than changing saving behaviour. It requires a sensitive approach in dealing with simultaneous savers and debtors. Individual financial capacity constrains their saving and borrowing behaviour change. Neighbourhood segmentation is useful in explaining the limitations when intervening in a financial behaviour change

Algorithms Based on Unions of Nonexpansive Maps

In this note, we consider a framework for the analysis of iterative algorithms which can described in terms of a structured set-valued operator. More precisely, at each point in the ambient space, we assume that the value of operator can be expressed as a finite union of values of single-valued paracontracting operators. Our main result, which shows that the associated fixed point iteration is locally convergent around strong fixed points, generalises a theorem due to Bauschke and Noll (2014).Comment: 8 page

Smooth (non)rigidity of piecewise rank one locally symmetric manifolds

We define \emph{piecewise rank 1} manifolds, which are aspherical manifolds that generally do not admit a nonpositively curved metric but can be decomposed into pieces that are diffeomorphic to finite volume, irreducible, locally symmetric, nonpositively curved manifolds with $\pi_1$-injective cusps. We prove smooth (self) rigidity for this class of manifolds in the case where the gluing preserves the cusps' homogeneous structure. We compute the group of self homotopy equivalences of such a manifold and show that it can contain a normal free abelian subgroup and thus, can be infinite. Elements of this abelian subgroup are twists along elements in the center of the fundamental group of a cusp.Comment: 20 pages, 1 figur