Dear ladies and gentlemen, my name is Johannes Kaur, currently postdoctoral researcher at
the University of Erlangen Nürnberg in Germany.
And for me, it's a pleasure on behalf of the entire team of the Europeid study to present
you the most recent results of our study, which attempted to assess the current state
of implementation in research, practice and policy regarding the concept of physical literacy.
We have submitted our results to the special issue, cultural perspective of physical literacy
within the Journal of Exercise Science and Fitness.
I want to start with the pressing need that we have to analyze how is also the current
state of physical activity over the world.
We know physical activity has a huge impact on health, on well-being and similar indicators
of quality of life.
But we are aware today that often physical activity levels are not that high as recommended.
When you here, for example, look at the map visualizing the prevalence of physical activity
for men, then we have to state that more than 25% of all men over the globe are not sufficiently
physically active.
An even more traumatic scenario can be drawn for women.
Here you see more red on the map highlighting that your physical inactivity prevalence
are even higher.
And by the way, also when we look not on adults, but also in children, there is no doubt that
we can do a lot in order to use physical activity as a means to be healthy.
The question arises, what are then the qualifications necessary to physically active lifestyle?
And here, once a concept comes into play, which has gained increasing attention in recent
years.
And that's the concept of physical literacy.
There are a variety of different definitions I have to admit, but the good thing is that
we have an International Physical Literacy Association, which represents the most common
consensus of the definitions.
And briefly, physical literacy can be defined here as the motivation, confidence, physical
competence, knowledge and understanding to value and take responsibility for engagement
in physical activity for life.
When we look at this definition in more detail, then we often find those Venn diagrams that
are visualized in several studies.
And these Venn diagrams identify certain domains also within this definition.
For example, physical competence, we can say that's the physical aspect of physical activity.
Motivation, confidence, that's the affective domain of physical activity, knowledge and
understand a cognitive domain is represented there.
And finally, this should lead to huge amount of daily behavior and that can be quickly
termed the behavioral domain of physical literacy.
If we just analyze it descriptively, which value is given to physical literacy, then
we have determined that it's represented in a lot of important policy document on physical
activity.
For example, the global action plan on physical activity by the World Health Organization
or it's mentioned in the UNESCO guidelines for policymakers of quality physical education.
The question arises, how is then physical literacy adopted if it is advocated by these
important political documents?
And our study wants to analyze this situation for Europe.
Because currently we don't have that knowledge about how the different countries adopt this
in Europe.
Admittedly, yes, there is a book by Margaret Whitehead that is called physical literacy
across the world.
But in this book, we have reports for Canada, Australia, also for countries like Wales,
Scotland, the England, but there is just one chapter for whole continental Europe.
And this chapter is, by the way, highly Dutch centered.
It's already three years ago, but there have been recent developments, which justify, we
need a more detailed and more updated look on the state of implementation of physical
literacy in Europe.
And for our study, two questions were guiding us for the analysis.
What is the current state of physical literacy in European countries and in Europe as a whole?
What are the commonalities, differences and challenging for implementing the approach
across Europe?
What we've done is a so-called complementary mixed method study.
It consisted of two parts.
First, we were conducting or we were running a qualitative study.
We've tried to identify a total of 25 countries or representatives of 25 countries.
We invited them to join our panel and we invited these experts to prepare country specific
reports about the status of physical literacy in their country.
Afterwards we collected all these reports and performed comparative document analysis.
With the content analysis underlying this procedure, we try to identify common categories.
And in the second part, we then try to revalidate these categories with a quantitative survey.
The methodology can be described as a complementary mixed method study because indeed the qualitative
part dominated our analysis in total.
Let us look now at the results.
After analyzing the different documents of the country specific reports, we identified
a total of 10 categories across the different countries.
And they in turn can be referred to four major categories.
So what was considered central in these reports, general conceptual aspects, aspects related
to research, practice and policy and also power related to future prospects.
I will go through the different qualitative results now.
The documents highlighted that conceptual aspects are highly relevant and a lot of reports
stated that there is an increasing number of countries that have adopted this term recently.
But there were also a lot of challenges why we cannot talk about a widespread acceptance
of this concept across Europe.
Often the different countries face translation challenges.
Can it be adopted somehow?
How can it be translated in a good word that does not stand in conflict with also competing
concepts, concepts that have huge traditions, which are highly embedded into academic discussion.
Accordingly, physical literacy is confronted by traditional aspects of the different countries
and competing concepts.
When we look at the research landscape, then we have to state there was very heterogeneous
power across different countries, meaning that there are countries who can be considered
the flagships of physical literacy research.
But on the other hand, there were several countries where physically was just mentioned
as a side note.
So very heterogeneous mixture.
We also found on the other hand that research had very different focus and there was a huge
variety of different research priorities.
For example, some studies focused on teaching styles, on assessment development, solving
problems in the community at schools or how is the empirical relevance for health outcomes.
And we also found here that obviously assessments have a very crucial role for the developmental
status of physical literacy in the countries.
You can imagine assessments open the door for wider surveys for assessing physical literacy
on the population level maybe and also to gather empirical findings afterwards.
We also found that there are other growing networks, also international collaborations
already in the area of physical literacy.
But we also found that the developmental status in the different countries was often dependent
on the effort of single researchers pushing that concept.
When we look in the area of facts and policy, we have to determine that physical literacy
hardly plays any role in political statements or health agendas on the national level.
In the area of curricula, of course, several physical literacy elements that I've mentioned
so far with it, Vendier runs are already included in some curricula so that we can say that
there is a basic competent with some assumptions of physical literacy, but very frequently
the concept is not mentioned per se.
Some national sport organizations already acknowledge the value of physical literacy
and also practical initiatives increasingly recognize the potential of physical literacy
as an approach or concept.
Finally, the category of future prospects revealed that the research anticipated increasing
attention of that approach in the next years.
Afterwards, or subsequent to this qualitative study, we also followed with a quantitative
survey trying to gather empirical quantitative data related to the categories across the
different countries.
We also performed operationalizations on four-point Likert scales for the different categories.
And afterwards, we summed the different items up.
And here we gathered this map here.
And this map visualizes how the implementation status is across the different countries that
participated within our study.
You once again, you find a very heterogeneous landscape with especially the Anglophone countries
having a better implementation score such as England, Wales, but there was also Denmark
as a non-Anglophone country, which further progress.
And then you find also on the continental Europe, yeah, a very modest and rather, you
can say weak developmental status of physical literacy, how this concept is adopted.
If you want to summarize the main findings of our study, yes, we found a heterogeneous
situation in Europe.
We have a lot of conceptual challenges before we can think about potential healthy or consensus
study.
We would rather suggest the single countries to clarify conceptual issues first before
we already try to solve that with a panel of different experts.
Physical literacy on the other hand has a chance for interdisciplinary work.
Interdisciplinary can be characterized as a main feature of sport and exercise science.
So it has the potential to unify the different sub disciplines of sports science.
This is a clear chance.
On the other hand, of course, this is a risk because people might not take talk the same
speak the same language in order to find together with such a unifying concept.
We consider the limitations of our study and the methodology applied that we have included
experts with different backgrounds.
Of course, they brought their subjective perspective into the project.
And in this regard, the values that may have been gathered may have been somehow biased
by the subjective experiences.
Of course, the reports that were sent to us as the core team of the study, we had to give
them a certain word limit and this may have affected maybe some whole reports on the detailed
level of quantitative survey was gained through the qualitative part.
But we haven't specifically validated this procedure psychometrically.
And as the last limitation, of course, not all European countries were represented in
our study, but we hope that maybe updates in the future that also those countries who
were not represented come into such a research panel in order to gain an even broader view
of the European situation with respect to physical interest.
In total, I want to say thank you very much for your attention.
At this point, of course, I have to also thank a lot of people.
I have to thank the whole European team consisting of different experts representing the 25 countries.
But nevertheless, I want to mention two persons specifically.
One person is Marjorie Green from England who represented the International Physical
Literacy Association, which strongly supported our initiative.
And of course, I also have to mention Peter Elsbork with who I have conceptualized the
study and have contacted the most part of the analysis of the study.
Thank you very much for your attention and now we can enjoy the wide view now to read
our study and to follow the next developments of physical literacy in Europe.