There is a declining proportion of children and youth in Sweden who are involved in sport associations, but there are also difficulties for youngsters to participate as leaders in associations. And so, the work of engaging more young people as leaders must be intensified by generating new knowledge and skills about sustainable leadership-roles for youth.

From the ethnographic approach which enables studying the social world in its ‘natural state’ and involves observations, data will be collected by planning, developing, and implementing workshops where young leaders together with experienced leaders from sport-clubs and associations are invited to share their experiences. In parallel, conduct semi-structured interviews with the participants that will be documented and analysed. The results from the interviews and workshops will form the basis for an intervention with some selected associations where sustainable leadership-roles will be tried, studied, and analysed.

Preliminary results show that young people tell us that they are rarely asked to lead in an association, some underline that they themselves cannot influence what happens during various activities. Furthermore, associations do not make use of their experiences and knowledge and have poor follow-ups after completed leadership trainings for youth. Hence, there is a need for collaboration between different actors in society such as the Academy, the municipality, sport associations and the private sector; a kind of relationship exchange where each experience can create new interactions based on interpretations of each others conceptual worlds, with the goal of generating new knowledge that is practically useful and theoretically interesting, with a common learning process as the core.

A starting point for this interactive research project with the aim to create change is collaboration. This approach which usually is described as part of the action research family has the purpose to identify a problem and develop solutions through a set of processes that are initiated. Also, since this study involves collaboration with different groups, there is a need for new ways and approaches to communicate and report findings to be able to include all participants.

Bradbury, H. (ed) (2015). The Sage handbook of action research. London: Sage

Coffey, A. (2018) Doing ethnography. London: Sage

Svensson, L., Ellström, P.-E., & Brulin, G. (2007). Introduction – on interactive research. International Journal of Action Research, 3(3), 233-249