Translating care from policy to practice: limits and lessons from an institutional ethnographic study examining Ontario youth volleyball
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Socio-cultural research on athlete maltreatment is well documented, with much work focused on examining the spectrum of mistreatment and programmatic/policy responses. While some sport governing bodies have implemented a ‘duty of care’ approach, more definitional analyses of care and caring in competitive youth sport remain absent. This gap served as point of departure for an institutional ethnographic study designed to examine practices of care and caring within the context of youth competitive volleyball through a socio-philosophical lens. Informed by the philosophical frameworks espoused in the Ethics of Care and the Ethics of Need, this paper utilises textual and interview data from the larger study to examine how athletes, coaches, and parents interpret and practice care in relationship to notions of care established in the sport organisation’s governing policies. The results showed how, at the institutional level, notions of care expressed in the sport organisation’s governing documents focused more so on identifying and preventing uncaring practices rather than illuminating what constitutes care and caring, while participants negotiated and interpreted their lived experiences of care as the prioritisation of the needs of athletes over the performance imperative. This was particularly true for coaches who were dually tasked with the care-taking of youth athletes on their teams, whilst also ensuring performance success on the playing field. Thus, coaches are responsible for practices of care in situ that are not fulsomely addressed in governing policies, which presents challenges for coaches when balancing athletes’ needs while also adhering to the aims of competitive sport.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.024 | 0.047 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".