Doping attitudes, moral disengagement, and ethical decision-making of young talented athletes: An advanced intervention study

Summary: 

The aim of the current study was to investigate the effectiveness of a refined ethical decision making program that was previously developed with WADA funding (Elbe, Schlegel, & Brand, 2012). Their prevention program was aimed at the ethical decisionmaking process, which encompasses more than just the sense of what is right and wrong. They adopted the dilemma technique in which participants were confronted with several sport-specific dilemma situations that they spontaneously had to react to and come up with pro and con arguments. Recently, Elbe and Brand (2015) pointed out that a systematic training of ethical decision-making is the way to move forward as it influences the decision to dope in sport situations and empowers young talented athletes to choose a doping-free path. Furthermore, our goal was to design an ethical decision making training program that is ready to be implemented as part of a structural national clean sports educational program.

Methodology

The materials from the original ethical decision-making program (Elbe, Schlegel, & Brand, 2012) were improved throughout six phases. Based on interviews with 16 adolescent athletes (56% female) between 12-20 years old: 12 dilemmas were selected and adapted. All dilemmas involved fictitious young athletes in an early career stage who were facing the decision to either use doping or not, or to report the doping use of another person or not. The dilemmas were then turned into animations in which visuals were used to present and emphasize the story as told by a 2 professional female voice-over. In addition, for each of the dilemma’s possible consequences for the choices faced by the characters were added. A serious gaming element was incorporated by creating a scoring system that allowed participants to earn points through the assignments dealing with the potential consequences of the dilemmas.

Results

In sum, the repeated measure revealed no significant effects of the training program on the outcome variables. There are several potential explanations for the absence of a favourable intervention effect: 1) a ‘floor effect’ (already favourable scores on doping attitude and moral disengagement before the intervention was offered, so little room for improvement) 2) exposure to the intervention too early in the athletes’ career (therefore not susceptible for the effect), and 3) the composition of our training program (number of sessions).

Significance for Clean Sport

It is advise to prepare a set of classroom lessons concerning the topic at hand and to schedule time to fill out the questionnaires and time to address the dilemmas in the session. This will result in higher response rates and less attrition. It is also advice the use of technological innovations, such as animations and clips, and to develop a serious game with different levels to challenge the respondents and enhance learning and prevention effects. Special attention should be given to privacy regulations (recently introduced in Europe) to ensure safety of personal data and the storage of privacy protected information. A follow-up measurements of doping attitude and moral disengagement is strongly recommended, for instance after 6, 12, and 24 months to investigate developments over time and to explore whether the intervention has a primary prevention effect.