"Kickstart to Recovery": An Irish Football Program for Mental Health Service Users.
Hannah Casey, Jenny Johnston, Maurice Dillon and 1 others
PMID 37350190WHAT IT FOUND
The main recovery and football meaning scores did not show a clear change.
Some energy scores moved positively and new participants' illness-management scores changed, but this pilot was too small to confirm.
Key findings
01The overall recovery and meaning-of-football scores did not show significant change after the study's correction for multiple tests.
02At the original threshold, the Energy/Fatigue domain differed for all participants (p = .011), and the Mastering My Illness domain differed for first-time participants (p = .042).
03Sites with 5 or 6 sessions differed from sites with 7 or 8 sessions on Social Functioning (p = .020) and Emotional Wellbeing (p = .016).
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
Only 27 of 40 participants completed both questionnaires, so the sample was small and may not represent all service users. There was no control group, so change could have come from time, expectation, or other supports. The programme was not identical across sites, and the researchers could not fully document or control all local adaptations. The study ran many tests and applied a correction for multiple comparisons, which left no significant results after correction. The authors then discussed uncorrected findings, which can be unstable. Participants already rated football as highly meaningful before starting, leaving little room for post-test improvement. All participants were male and had played football before, so findings may not apply to women or people with no football history.
Declared interests
HSE and FAI collaborated with Trinity College Dublin and provided resources for the pilot. The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest and no financial support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat the football programme as proven to improve recovery or quality of life. The overall scores did not reach the study's corrected significance threshold, and the study had only 27 participants with no control group. The programme included coaching, occupational therapy, and site-specific social elements, and the study cannot separate which part mattered.