Succeed Clean Program Evaluation

This report highlights the results of student surveys completed by participants in the Succeed Clean project. The Succeed Clean project was funded by the Ontario Trillium Foundation to develop an approach to educating young people, parents, coaches and educators about the risks and realities of Appearance and Performance Enhancing Drugs (APEDs). The project was a partnership between the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, University of Waterloo Athletics, Laurier Athletics, Waterloo Region Police Services, and the Kitchener Rangers Hockey Organization. The purpose of the program was to educate young people to help them to make healthy choices and reach their potential without appearance and performance enhancing drugs. The centre was involved to evaluate the program and hold parent community conversations to determine the needs of participants and the community. The centre developed the pre- and post-surveys that were handed out to students attending these educational presentations. The centre collected and analyzed over 1,000 surveys from eight different communities in Ontario between fall 2016 to spring 2017.

The results reveal more support for the finding that APEDs knowledge, use, and beliefs are gendered. Males more willing to consider taking an APED, are then more likely to be taking a supplement, and are less likely to perceive supplements as risky and five of six APEDs users are male. This finding does not imply females should be overlooked, however.

The results offer some evidence that there is a relationship between nutritional supplements and APEDs, which was a questions raised in the parent community conversations. Students who indicated a willingness to use an APED were more likely to be taking a nutritional supplement and five of the six self-identified steroid/HGH users in the study were also taking 2+ supplements.

The results from the pre- and post-survey comparisons demonstrated that after the presentation, students increased their understanding of the potential risks of supplements, increased their knowledge about side effects of steroids, were less willing to take an APED and had increased knowledge about healthy ways to improve performance.