Smyth, Mary M. and Anderson, H. I. (2001) Football participation in the school playground: the role of coordination impairments. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 19 (3). pp. 369-379. ISSN 0261-510X
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Children with movement impairments, as identified by the Movement Assessment Battery for Children (Movement ABC), have been shown to be more isolated than others in the school playground and to play team games such as football less often than others. The goal of the present investigation was to examine whether early coordination impairments were related to later football participation in the school playground. The participants were 64 boys, 32 in a movement impaired group and 32 in a non-impaired group, who were divided into groups of those who were often alone and those who were not. The not-alone group was further subdivided into those who played football for considerable periods and those who did not. There were 10 boys with poor scores on the Movement ABC who were not often alone and who played football for considerable amounts of time. Analyses of the subscales of the ABC indicated that the balance subscale was significantly related to participation in football, but that some boys with relatively poor balance scores did play football. Only extremely poor performance on the balance tasks of the Movement ABC was related to non-participation in football. Some of the key differences between groups of children with movement impairments in terms of their inclusion in social and physical games like football may not relate to hand/eye coordination and manual control, but to the ability to maintain posture while carrying out other movements, particularly when balance skills are extremely poor.