Capturing the realities of sports programmes: systematic ‘messiness’?

There is growing pressure for those who work in community sport to design and deliver sports programmes with evaluation in mind. Beyond reporting on how interventions have been implemented, those managing interventions need to be able to fully explain not just what works but why it works. This paper will demonstrate the application of Realistic Evaluation through a repertoire of concepts and methods. The intervention strategy and evaluation were developed by a sub-regional Community Sport Network involving research expertise from the local university, the public sector sport development department and third sector sports clubs, supported by Sport England’s Community Investment Fund. The paper will present ‘outcome patterns’ for the strategy and explain the methods that helped build them, developed through a phased and longitudinal evaluation design. Using context-mechanism-outcome configurations long-term outcomes such as improvements to health and wellbeing were related to the necessary conditions and most appropriate mechanisms in the selected programmes. Recommendations are based on the reflections of evaluating this sport and physical activity strategy in the Northwest of England. This will contribute to developing insight for evaluation approaches for multiple sports projects within a community setting.