Tackle football has been one of the most popular sports for boys in the United States since the mid-twentieth century. This dissertation examines how debates over the safety of football for children at the high school level and younger have changed from 1945 through the present. After World War II, the expansion of youth tackle football leagues, particularly for pre-pubescent children, fostered a new range of medical and educational concerns. Yet calls for limits on tackle football were largely obscured by the political and social culture of the Cold War, including beliefs about violence, masculinity, and competition. A broad range of groups and individuals were involved in debating the safety of youth football throughout the remainder of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. These groups included doctors, coaches, educators, lawyers, engineers, parents, athletes, journalists, and sporting goods manufacturers. Their arguments over the risks and benefits of youth football involved not only the sport’s effects on physical health, but also on social and emotional well-being. By the 1970s, researchers were applying injury epidemiology methods to studying key mechanisms involved in football injuries, while a broader consumer product safety movement contributed to the development of the first football helmet standards. Football equipment not only remained a primary focus of football safety debates, but often symbolized safety itself. Sporting goods manufacturers largely succeeded in framing the issue of football safety as a matter of individual responsibility. The social position of children and their communities shaped debates over the risks and benefits of football, including the sport’s spectator nature. By the early twentieth-first century, concerns about football-related brain injuries at all levels of the sport emerged as a topic of national debate. New medical findings and the reporting and advocacy of journalists and former athletes contributed to increasing awareness of brain trauma in the sport. Debates over the appropriate policy recommendations to make in the context of uncertainty over youth football’s long-term consequences have persisted since 1945 through the present.

The study attempts to assess the capacity of football development programmes to help bring about development at the individual and societal levels. It is concerned with understanding the needs of underprivileged communities through their involvement in football for development programmes and whether such programmes are viable mechanisms to empower these communities with opportunities for a better livelihood. The study will consider whether grassroots sport programmes have any role to play in the formulation of development policy that promoted social integration, self-actualisation, improving cognitive skills, health conditions in underprivileged societies. Included within this formulation is the awareness of how to provide employment opportunities. The study will contextualise development within Amartya Sen's capabilities theory whilst looking at the role of sport as both a means to an end and as an end in itself through the lens of the work of social theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Robert Putnam and Abraham Maslow. A literature review on some of the potential benefits and costs of sport for development programmes, including a review of international literature of similar concepts being applied around the world will provide the background for assessment of the study. Central to this study‟s research is the particular initiative taken by WhizzKids United, a locally-based organization working in the field of life-skills development through the active participation of youth from underprivileged communities in and around the city of Durban in South Africa. Further assessment will take into account the perceptions of participants and stakeholders in relation to the impact the 2010 FIFA World Cup will have on development policy in South Africa, as well as on the delivery of football for development programmes such as WhizzKids United. / Thesis (M.Dev.Studies)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2010.

Parents make decisions on behalf of their children on a daily basis. Some parents in the United States face the unique decision of whether or not to allow football participation for their child at a very young age. Using sensemaking theory, I examined how parents assessed the risks involved in making the decision to allow their child to play tackle football. I interviewed 24 participants in the form of 12 parental couples who had children playing middle school football and coded their responses to identify themes and strategies for risk assessment. Themes that emerged were decision-agency (parent and child agency), risk assessment (downplaying risk, acknowledgement of risk with rationalizations, zero risk assessment), and decision-making concepts (cultural influence, familial identity, social influences, information sources). I expanded on the sensemaking supposition of individual identity by arguing that familial identity can also impact decision-making. A key finding to this study was the typology of parents that emerged including football families-parent agency, hesitant family- parent agency, and child focused family-child agency. The type of family reflected families' reception to community culture, impact of social influence, and openness to information sources. Family type also impacted the risk assessment process and belief of control over outcomes in football participation.