Using Co-Design Workshops to Create Sport Participation Strategies: Insights From a Case Study in Female Adolescent Sport

Despite well-documented physical, mental and developmental health benefits of organised sport participation, sport dropout rates for female adolescents continue to surpass those of male adolescents. Currently, sport dropout is seen as a negative endpoint of an adolescent’s sport participation journey, and no effective method of re-engaging dropped out participants exists globally. Co-design workshops may be a productive method of creating strategies to re-engage this cohort, but there is currently limited literature documenting their use in this setting. To address this gap, this paper presents a case study which employed co-design workshops with adult stakeholders in female adolescent sport ( n = 25) to create a sport re-engagement strategy for female adolescents. Workshop design was informed by two conceptual models (the Youth Sport System and the Participation Re-Engagement model) and rich qualitative data from female adolescents. Across three interactive workshops, participants engaged in multiple individual and group activities which informed the development of sport re-engagement guidelines for female adolescents. These guidelines have subsequently been endorsed, published, and disseminated by State Government. This paper critically discusses the strengths and limitations of the method, and succinct recommendations are made for researchers considering the use of co-design workshops as an interactive data collection method in future.