Reaching out: help-seeking among professional male ice hockey athletes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to explore male ice hockey athletes’ experiences with barriers and facilitators to asking for help while competing in professional leagues (e.g. National Hockey League). Using a critical interpretivist approach, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 athletes (aged 24–41 years), who either held a professional contract or recently retired from professional ice hockey within five years of the interview. The data were thematically analysed whereby four overarching themes and 19 subthemes were identified to reflect the various barriers to, and facilitators of, athlete help- seeking. The themes included (1) cultural norms: old versus new school (2) culturally informed identities, (3) personal agency, and (4) provision of resources. The first theme reflects how tensions between old and new school cultural norms promote and/or restrict help-seeking. The second theme encompasses how participants described their sense of self, as linked to help-seeking within the context of professional ice hockey. The third theme details how participants perceived their help-seeking literacy, autonomy, maturity, and personal mindset to facilitate or restrict help-seeking. The final theme corresponded to how the quality of the resources and relationships with support personnel facilitated or created barriers to help-seeking. The results indicate that the culture of professional ice hockey is highly influential in terms of how athletes understand and frame help-seeking behaviours and, in turn, how they engage in help-seeking behaviours. The findings further highlight potential means through which key social agents (e.g. coaches, psychologists, general managers) can reduce barriers and facilitate athlete help-seeking.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".