RESEARCHERS

The first, within group dynamics research, group cohesion, and achievement motivation, we try to understand the role that youth sport participation, sports experience, as one of the most important organised out-of-school activities, plays in positive personal and life skills development and the promotion of well-being for youth. Positive outcomes are to some extent dependent on the sporting environment created, therefore we explore motivational climate and is relations with others variables, whitin a collaboratives projects. Development of intervention programs to enhance the acquisition of healthy lifestyles trough social values of sport, in particular health, physical fitness, social inclusion and improvement of sport motivation, by implementing intervention program to carry out through the involvement of children typically developing and with special needs as well as their parents. Diagnosis, analysis and evaluation of the sports ecosystem at national level (i.e. National Studies about the representativeness of the sport sector (European Commission project) ; and a ongoing national project, the first, in Portugal, that aims to get an insight about career transition of athletes participating in Olympic (COP), a very challenging topic, once athletes dedicate a significant portion of their lives to training and competing at the highest level, and transitioning to a post-competitive career requires careful planning and support. Aligned with the SDGs, and within the scope of projects with international teams, trying to mitigate the low frequency and levels of engagement in sport and other physical activity we have developed: a) Enriched Sport Activities Program (https://www.esaprogram.eu/)((Erasmus + Project); b) New Health Program 'Healthy Lifestyle promotor' (Erasmus + Project); c) HEALTHY LIFESTYLE NETWORK EUROPE (Erasmus + Project); c)Psychometric assessments are valuable tools for measuring various psychological constructs, and their adaptation ensures their reliability and validity in a specific cultural and linguistic context. Understanding the factors associated with how youth athletes view their group environment and the effect of coaches’ behaviors on the psychological well-being of the team is a crucial theme within the sport group dynamics. We developed a robust research design for your team-building program, a multidimensional psychological intervention, based on the principles of team building to foster the development of cohesion and satisfaction in a football team. Recently using a prospective design with two time points, the polynomial regression with a response surface analysis indicated that the effect of an ego-involving climate on task cohesion varied as a function of task-involving climate perceptions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to use response surface analysis to examine how coach-initiated motivational climate predicted youth athletes’ perception of cohesion in a highly competitive sporting context (i.e., national youth sport players) using age-appropriate instruments .