The Role of Social Support in Concussion Rehabilitation: A Prospective Mixed Methods Study of Canadian University Athletes’ Return to Sport
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CONTEXT: Social support is an important consideration during athletes' rehabilitation following a concussion. Yet, its influence during the return-to-sport (RTS) strategy has been underexplored. DESIGN: Concussed athletes' experiences with social support during RTS were explored prospectively using an explanatory sequential mixed methods design. METHODS: University rugby, basketball, and track and field athletes (N = 8) from a single Canadian institution, 19-23 years of age (mean = 20.63, SD = 1.51), completed concentric circles maps, the Perceived Available Support in Sport Questionnaire, and 2 semistructured interviews during their RTS. We analyzed concentric circles maps and questionnaire data descriptively and interview data using codebook thematic analysis. RESULTS: Athletes identified 16 different social support agents. The 5 most important agents during RTS were athletic therapists, student therapists, head coaches, significant others, and teammates/friends. Significant others provided the most emotional (mean = 2.82, SD = 1.85) and esteem (mean = 2.63, SD = 1.85) support, and the athletic therapist (mean = 1.82, SD = 1.35) and head coaches (mean = 0.93, SD = 1.19) provided the most informational and tangible support. We generated 4 themes from athletes' interviews: social support behaviors, contextual factors, concussion and RTS factors, and psychological readiness factors. CONCLUSIONS: The number of social support agents present, frequency of support types, and demonstration of support behaviors decreased across the concussion RTS strategy. Contextual (ie, toughness), concussion (ie, visibility), and RTS (ie, prognosis uncertainty) factors influenced athletes' perceptions of social support agents' support behaviors. Results add to our limited understanding of athletes' social support during RTS following a concussion and suggest exploring the integration of behavior-specific (eg, checking in, providing reassurance, and demonstrating compassion) social support strategies to promote concussion rehabilitation and readiness to RTS.
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 | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".