By Laurel White
A School of Education faculty member recently helped develop the first validated tool to measure youth sport specialization while considering physical, motivational, and social characteristics of sport participation.
Youth sport specialization is defined as “the intentional and focused participation in a single sport for a majority of the year that restricts opportunities for engagement in other sports and activities.”
The new tool was created as part of a study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. David Bell, a professor in the School of Education’s Department of Kinesiology, was one of the study’s co-authors. He says advancing knowledge around youth sport specialization could benefit many young athletes in Wisconsin and across the country.
“We care about youth sport specialization because it’s ubiquitous in youth sport,” Bell said during a recent panel hosted by the National Athletic Trainers’ Association. “This is growing into a public health issue.”
Previous research has suggested higher levels of specialization are associated with an increased risk of injury, burnout, and lower quality of life. However, evidence has been mixed, particularly when psychosocial consequences are examined. Bell and his co-authors hope the new tool — called The Wisconsin Sport Specialization Questionnaire (WISSQ) — will help create consensus on specialization measurement, which will support high-quality research on the subject.
WISSQ also offers an important expansion of previous methods of sport specialization measurement by including a young athlete’s motivations and social life outside of sport.
“By including these characteristics when assessing an athlete’s level of specialization, our tool offers a more nuanced measurement that will give us a deeper understanding of how specialization affects youth on multiple levels,” Bell says.
The study analyzed survey responses from roughly 1,000 young athletes from 14 to 18-years-old to create WISSQ.
Kinesiology doctoral students Emily Srygler and Madison Renner were also co-authors of the study. Other co-authors were Department of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation faculty Stephanie Kliethermes, M. Alison Brooks, and Tim McGuine, Department of Family Medicine and Community Health faculty member Evan Nelson, and Department of Nursing faculty member Roger Brown. Kevin Biese, faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh, and Traci Snedden, faculty at the University of Colorado, were also co-authors.
Bell’s work on sport specialization has been featured by ESPN and USA Today, among other media outlets. Broadly, his research focuses on identifying risk factors for musculoskeletal injuries with a special focus on sport specialization in children. He teaches in the School of Education’s athletic training program and serves as the director of the Wisconsin Injury in Sport Laboratory.
The full study, “Development and validation of the Wisconsin Sport Specialization Questionnaire (WISSQ) for older adolescent athletes,” is available online.