Understanding the social return on investment of physical activity and sport: developing an international consensus

Davies, Larissa ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0591-7507, Jiménez, Alfonso, Nieto, Inés, Mayo, Xian and Reece, Lindsay (2025) Understanding the social return on investment of physical activity and sport: developing an international consensus. Exercise, Sport and Movement, 3 (1S). e00033.

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Abstract

There is growing demand from policy makers and practitioners to understand and measure the social impact of physical activity and sport (PAS) driven by the needs to justify investments from funders, improve decision-making of PAS managers, and produce robust and defensible evidence to underpin international and national PAS policy. Social return on investment (SROI) has emerged as a credible framework for measuring the non-financial impact of PAS; however, there is a lack of agreement about what and how social outcomes should be measured and valued. This article presents a research project that aims to address this gap through a systematic review and three-round Delphi study. The review identified five domains of social impact, and the Delphi study achieved consensus across 29 statements relating to health, education, crime, social capital, and well-being. The next stage of the project is to establish the most appropriate valuation techniques for capturing the monetary value of social outcomes from PAS across the domains. When complete, this research should encourage a more standardized approach to social impact measurement, which will help PAS stakeholders to articulate the social value of the sector more consistently.