Advancing safe sport through occupational health and safety: refugee athletes' experiences within national and international Canadian sport contexts

In many parts of the world, elite athletes are forced to flee their countries in search of \nsafety from war, human rights violations, and conflict. Refugees are more likely to encounter \ntraumatic events that in turn threaten their safety. Sports offer pathways for elite refugee athletes \nto integrate into their host communities through providing opportunities for making connections, \nlearning language, and healing from previous traumas. Sports can also provide refugee athletes \nwith outlets to cope with previous life encounters and pursue sporting success at the elite level. \nThe elite sport contexts that refugee athletes are integrated into can include instances of \nintentional abuse. Safe sport is a philosophy developed for creating sport environments that are \nfree from abuse. Safety is a subjective feeling influenced by previous life adversities. \nContemporary safe sport interventions have been informed using the adversities of Canadian born athletes, coaches, and researchers who have not been forced to uproot their lives out of \nnecessity. Missing from our conceptualization of safe sport are the insights of elite refugee \nathletes, who, despite trauma and cultural differences, have thrived nationally and internationally \nfor Canada. My aim within this research was to use elite refugee athletes’ experiences to inform \nnational safeguards and recommendation for improving host country sports systems. Situated \nwithin a critical realist ontological paradigm, I approached this research with the assumption that \nthere are generative mechanisms (factors that cause experiences to occur) that support safety and \neffective adaptations following forced migration. The research process began with a meta synthesis of qualitative research conducted with elite athletes who have experienced abuse within \ntheir elite sports context. This meta-synthesis was written to provide a snapshot of the context of \nabuse within elite sport, providing evidence for contextual mechanisms that cause abuse to occur \n(i.e., the generative mechanisms) and situating the contexts in which elite refugee athletes \nmigrate (see Giffin, Schinke, Wagstaff et al., 2023a). Arts-based conversational interviews were \nthen utilized with 14 refugee athletes to learn of their experiences of migration and subsequent \nrelocation into the Canadian sports system. A reflexive thematic analysis was used to generate \nthemes that connected the athletes’ experiences. Two central themes were created to outline (a) \nmechanisms that support adaptive cultural transition of elite refugee athletes, and (b) \nmechanisms that facilitate growth following migration and transition into a host country sports \nsystem. These themes were constructed into two polyphonic vignettes, a form of data \nrepresentation featuring multiple composite characters engaging in non-fiction conversation, to \nensure anonymity and confidentiality whilst highlighting the complexity and context of forced \nmigration, resettlement, and growth. These two polyphonic vignettes were written into two \nempirical manuscripts, both accepted (see Giffin, Schinke, Larivière et al., 2023; Giffin et al., \n2024). Finally, these mechanisms were translated into practice through a series of \nrecommendations for sports psychology practitioners, submitted to an applied journal for review \n(currently in revision). Conclusions and implications uniting the four accepted manuscripts \ncomprising this dissertation are then presented.

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