This thesis is the result of an Industrial PhD project between the non-profit street sport organisation GAME, University of Copenhagen, and Steno Diabetes Center Copenhagen. The PhD project was part of the ASPHALT project (2018-2020) in which these three partner organisations took part. In ASPHALT, GAME’s youth-led, peer-to-peer community sport programme was further developed, and a pilot study conducted.
Peer education builds on rationales that peer leaders are credible and authentic role models to their peers because peers identify with each other based on their peer relationship; their ‘peerness’. Peer-led approaches are widely used for health promotion purposes and have been suggested to attract population groups usually considered hardly reached by health promotion programmes. However, much work remains to be done to understand the processes
involved in peer education and the ways in which the rationales behind the approach are activated in peer-led programmes. Therefore, this PhD study explored how the rationales of peer education can be enacted in peer-led physical activity programmes and how programmatic and contextual factors shape the possibilities of youth peer leaders in a community sport programme.
For this purpose, I conducted three sub-studies comprising a literature review and two empirical
studies of a peer-led programme organised by GAME.