Canadian national sport organisations’ eating disorder-related policies and practice guidelines: a summative content analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Athletes are at significant risk of developing eating disorders (EDs). To address EDs in sport, policies can support the prevention, management, and return to sport following EDs. Although Canadian National Sport Organisations (NSOs) must comply with a universal code of conduct to address maltreatment in sport, there may be a need for additional policies and guidelines to address EDs. The purpose of this study was to examine the scope and content of ED-related policies and practice guidelines within Canadian NSOs. We searched all publicly available policy and guideline documents from Canada’s 64 NSOs and screened them for keywords related to disordered eating, body image, nutrition, diet, and exercise, yielding 98 policies and 39 guidelines. We conducted a summative content analysis to examine the contextual use of our keywords and the sociocultural implications of such use. No NSO had specific policy or practice guidelines addressing EDs. Policies described body shaming-related maltreatment using standard language from the universal code of conduct. Within guidelines, ED-related topics were discussed in relation to mental health, athlete development, nutrition, coaching female athletes, positive body image, and weight management. Comparing content within policies and guidelines revealed a lack of coherence, wherein policies outlined ‘what not to do’ but guidelines did not provide adequate guidance on ‘what to do’, drawing instead on weight-normative and gendered discourse to address ED topics. This study provides insight into the current state of systemic (in)action surrounding EDs in Canadian sport and serves as a preliminary step towards the development of ED policy.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".