Effectiveness of a school-based doping prevention programme in Spanish adolescents

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to assess the effectiveness of a school-based programme to improve knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about doping. 540 adolescents (aged 12-13 years old, 50% boys) took part, from eight Spanish schools. Three hundred and thirteen of these were in the experimental group and the rest formed a control group. Six sessions were held, based on international recommendations, during the Physical Education classes, and were assessed with the Questionnaire on the Anti-doping Intervention programme. The principal results showed that the knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about doping improved in the experimental group compared to the control group, for the whole of the questionnaire (p<.001, Eta 2 =.03) and specifically for the factors Concept (p<.001, Eta 2 =.004), Utility (p<.01, Eta 2 =.02) and Sport and doping (p<.01, Eta 2 =.01). But there were no benefits observed in the factors Methods and Origin of the behaviour. In conclusion, school-based programmes may be useful for improving knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about doping among adolescents.

Education Interventions to Improve Knowledge, Beliefs, Intentions and Practices with Respect to Dietary Supplements and Doping Substances: A Narrative Review

“…The majority of the interventions were delivered using a pretest post-test control group design [35,38,[41][42][43][44]46,47,50,51,[53][54][55][56], which controls for several threats to internal validity [65]. However, other studies used quasi-experimental designs [33,34,39,40,48,49,57], which does not guarantee that the groups were comparable at baseline. Four studies used a pre-experimental design [36,37,45,52], which is associated with multiple threats to internal validity, such as history, maturation, testing, and statistical regression [65].…”

“…The interventions were carried out in a diverse range of countries. Seven studies were conducted in the United States of America [41][42][43][44]48,54,56], five in the United Kingdom [45,47,50,51,53], three in Greece [35,47,53], two in Iran [33,46], two in Italy [37,49], one in Japan [36], Spain [34], Sweden [52], Germany [39], Malaysia [40], Australia [57], Canada [38], and Norway [55]. The sample size ranged from 35 to 20,800 and participants were older than 12 years of age.…”

“…The majority of the interventions (16 out of 22) involved adolescents [33][34][35]37,48,49,52,55] and young athletes [38,44,45,47,51,54,56,57].…”

“…The majority of the studies used multiple procedures to deliver their curriculum contents. The most used were lectures and presentations [36,37,40,42,43,48,51,52,55,58], group discussions [33,34,40,[46][47][48], and written materials in the form of booklets, handouts, leaflets, posters, brochures and pamphlets that were mainly used in studies that used active control groups [40][41][42][43][44]. Some interventions used role playing [33,47] and physical activity including weight room training sessions and strength training sessions [43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55].…”

“…The interventions were delivered by the investigators themselves [36,40,48], trained facilitators/staff [33,44,47,53,55], physical education teachers [34,35,57], coaches and squad leaders [41,54], track and field athletes [45], and health workers [52]. Some studies were implemented by a combination of different professionals to tackle different aspects of the intervention.…”