Recovering with grace: a grounded theory of female artistic sport athletes’ experiences with sport-related concussion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Guidelines for sport-related concussion (SRC) have largely been based on male samples, despite evidence that females, when compared to males, report more SRCs, experience more severe symptoms, and have longer recoveries. Additionally, most SRC research has focused on contact and collision sport athletes, which overlooks athletes in artistic sports, who are also at risk of SRC. Artistic sport athletes compete in perfection- and appearance-focused environments, which involves risk-taking and normalising pain, and therefore influences how their experiences with SRCs. Using constructivist grounded theory, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 29 female athletes involved six artistic sports: artistic swimming, cheerleading, cologuard, diving, figure skating, and gymnastics. We followed recommendations for grounded theory analysis, and our theory comprises six concepts and uncovers the underlying processes that explain how and why these experiences occur. Overall, we found that the perfection-driven culture in artistic sports encourages many athletes to mask pain and SRC symptoms to simultaneously show toughness and grace. Some participants reported having negative interactions with healthcare professionals, who doubted the possibility of experiencing an SRC in their sport, reflecting stereotypes embedded in these sports. Finally, participants highlighted gaps in support, including limited medical personnel and inconsistent access to SRC education, which could stem from the perception that these sports are less risky and of lesser importance. Future studies should consider using immersive qualitative methodologies and methods, such as ethnography and observations, to capture the subtle socio-cultural and contextual factors shaping athletes’ experiences that may be overlooked by more traditional qualitative approaches.
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 | 0.013 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".