Research

Funding body: Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth | Funding reference: ZMl7/2523XXX046 (Funding amount 2023 and 2024: € 450,000, of which € 185,000 PI)

PI: Prof. Dr. Dennis Dreiskämper

As part of the Move For Health project of the German Sports Youth in the DOSB (dsj), funded by the Future Package, a total of €450,000 was made available for the science module for the years 2023 and 2024 for accompanying scientific research. Under the project management of Prof. Dr. Dennis Dreiskämper, a joint project consisting of a total of five sub-projects (seven partners, six universities) was designed, which deals with the following topics

1. Psycho-social health of children and young people and the potential of exercise, play and sport
2. The sports club as an attractive living environment for children and young people growing up
3. Socially disadvantaged and non-sporting groups: Challenges and conditions for success in sport

The three subject areas will be examined both quantitatively (in the form of a representative Germany-wide survey) and qualitatively (through in-depth studies in specific areas). The content and results will be linked and interlinked in the form of collaborative research using mixed-method approaches. This means that all three topics are covered methodically identically in the panel and taken up in the in-depth studies. The first survey took place in July and August 2023 in over 4,000 households, with parents of 2,112 children between the ages of 5 and 12, parents of 1,978 young people aged 13 to 17 and the young people themselves being surveyed. In 2024, a longitudinal section (including growth) was carried out. In addition to the existing questions, the area of democracy promotion and attitudes was added as a further variable.

The keyword "Growing up healthy in childhood" covers various AB priority research projects, including the following

• Healthy children in healthy communities (funded by the EU Interreg V - VII; 2011-2021, daily exercise times for more than 3,000 children in elementary school and daycare centers in NRW, the Netherlands, Poland and Brandenburg)
• Gesunde Kommune Altenberge (since 2016, motor skills testing in elementary school, teacher and parent training)
• DRAGO's jungle adventure: comprehensive survey of the motor skills of third-graders in a district in Lower Saxony
• Sportlichter (funded by the DSEE; development of support and challenge programs and their evaluation in all-day elementary school)

• Development of measurement instruments for physical self-concept in childhood (to the homepage with inventories and materials here (link follows))
• Investigation of the influence of physical self-concept on motivation and sports behavior
• Sensitization of teachers and coaches for the topic of self-perception of children and adolescents
• Theory development on the development and significance of the self-concept across the lifespan

Research proposals are currently in preparation; inquiries for BA and MA theses on this topic are expressly welcome.

Effort is a key factor influencing performance. The question of how to achieve
performance is complex and requires a clear understanding of the performance parameters.
Effort is considered an important factor for athletic performance, especially in goal-oriented
processes. Despite the prevalence of the concept in research and practice, the term
is rarely clearly defined and operationalized, although the number of articles about it is steadily
increasing.
Hannah Pauly and Dennis Dreiskämper, together with Svenja Anna Wolf (Florida
State University, USA) and Bernd Strauss (University of Münster), are researching how effort
can be defined and measured in this area. Based on this, we are experimentally investigating
the extent to which the integration of effort into the Theory of Challenge and Threat States
(TCTSA) can better explain performance. In addition, further underlying
mechanisms that influence effort and in turn performance will be investigated.

Sport plays a central role in adolescents’ leisure activities. At the same time, social media has become significantly more important in recent years. On platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, young people are confronted almost daily with idealised and often edited depictions of bodies and lifestyles. This content offers a wide range of points of comparison and can influence young people’s well-being and sporting behaviour.

In her PhD thesis, Annalena Veltmaat is investigating the links between social media use, body image, mental health and sporting behaviour among 13- to 19-year-olds.  The research also addresses the particular vulnerability of young people.

Contact: annalena.veltmaat@tu-dortmund.de

With the introduction of a school-wide mobile phone ban from August 2026, the Alter Teichweg (ATw) district school in Hamburg is implementing a far-reaching structural change. As the Emil-Krause School will also be introducing a mobile phone ban in November 2026, the Emil-Krause School will initially serve as a control group during the period between the two implementations.
The academic support provided by the University of Potsdam and TU Dortmund aims to conduct an evidence-based analysis of whether and how key areas of school development are changing. The study addresses a clear gap in the research: whilst the effects of mobile phone bans on academic performance and well-being are increasingly being investigated, there is a near-total lack of studies on physical activity, body image and adolescents’ subjective experience of their bodies. The report published in April 2026 by the BMBFSFJ’s Independent Expert Commission on ‘Child and Youth Protection in the Digital World’ confirms the urgent need for longitudinal studies on the effects of digital media regulation and explicitly identifies gaps in research in the areas of body perception and intra-individual trajectory analyses.

This project is the first study to examine the behavioural, body image and physical activity outcomes of a school-wide mobile phone ban using a longitudinal design, a control group, a mixed-methods framework and a qualitative perspective from pupils’ point of view in a German school.

Funding Agency: German Research Foundation (DFG)

Project Leader: Dr. Dennis Krämer (University of Münster)

The goal of this project is to establish an interdisciplinary research network on health, technology, resilience, and crises between Germany and Japan. Prof. Dr. Dennis Dreiskämper is a member of this research consortium. Further information can be found here: https://www.resilient-healthcare.de

Funding Source: Erasmus+ (EU)

Project Leaders: Prof. Dr. Ian Boardley, Prof. Andreá Petroczi, Prof. Susan Backhouse

The goal of this project is to establish an interdisciplinary research network to improve communication between athletes, elite sports, and research. Further information can be found here: https://www.cleansportalliance.org/

The ability of a team to make similar decisions and take similar actions is crucial to team performance. Shared Mental Models (SMMs) are representations of knowledge held by individual team members that are shared and supplemented at the team level. In team sports, they help individual team members coordinate with one another. In recent years, an increasing number of authors have studied SMMs; however, the empirical findings in sports have varied widely. Dr. Charlotte Behlau’s doctoral dissertation therefore focused on developing appropriate measurement methods to contribute to the advancement of team research. 

Team decisions and other group dynamics (such as team trust or collective efficacy) play a significant role in team performance, both in traditional sports and in esports. Esports has become increasingly popular in recent years, and by 2025, viewership is estimated to rise further to 640 million (Statista, 2025). The International Olympic Committee took notice of this as early as 2018 and established a working group to examine the differences and similarities between traditional sports and esports. Similarly, an academic discussion has emerged among sports scientists regarding the extent to which esports can be considered a sport. We published a position paper on this topic in the German Journal of Sport Science together with colleagues; furthermore, we approached the discussion from a data-driven perspective, concluding that the team dynamics of esports and traditional team athletes are similar.

Funding Source: State Chancellery of North Rhine-Westphalia (2023–2024); Project Budget: €20,000

Project Director: Prof. Dr. Nils Neuber (University of Münster)

Data on sports behavior—such as athletic and physical activity, membership in sports clubs, and predictors of physical activity like motivation, enjoyment of sports, self-efficacy, self-concept, emotions, and affect—are often not collected systematically. The goal is to provide a representative overview of the results and methods used in collecting physical activity data from children and adolescents in North Rhine-Westphalia.