The Influence of the Social Determinants of Health on Para-sports Involvement Throughout the Caribbean and Americas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the number of individuals with a disability grows worldwide, the Paralympic Games and para-sports have seen a growth in participation (WHO, 2011). However, international sporting competitions including the Paralympic Games remain dominated by developed countries (Andreff, 2001). In the last Paralympic Games, the USA, Canada, and Brazil made up nearly 70% of participants from the North and South American region with 17 of the 28 committees sending five or less participants (Maleske & Sant, 2020). The present study investigates the social and cultural determinants in the Caribbean and Americas of para-sport participation in the region and their relation to para-sport involvement. This paper presents a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with regional committee executives and athletes to better understand how social and health determinants impact para-sport involvement. Analysis indicated there are widespread challenges to involvement in sport experienced in the Caribbean and America’s region. These include: minimal financial support and capacity; limited opportunity within educational systems; a general unfamiliarity with para-sport that is combined with a mainstream negative perception of disability; and several structural barriers reducing accessibility. These findings mirror existing literature and stress the complex combination of social and cultural factors that pose challenges to the establishment of and engagement in para-sport. Future research and program initiatives that aim to assist the region’s para-sport movement must look beyond ordinary monetary stimulus and consider contextualized support which may involve raising awareness, improving administrative structures, and promoting grassroots development of athletes and other human resources.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".