Time for a new story: Circulating alternative narratives of parasport participation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Narrative messages are effective health promotion tools when the plot evokes positive feelings and when viewers identify with the characters; however, the dominant narrative of parasport participation currently circulated in the media (i.e., the performance narrative) likely perpetuates psychosocial barriers to parasport participation (e.g., low self-efficacy). The performance narrative is defined by its focus on athletic ability and overcoming disability. Alternative parasport narratives (i.e., relational, discovery) exist but are seldom used in parasport media. Guided by the Extended Elaboration Likelihood Model and the Health Action Process Approach as theoretical bases, this thesis aimed to explore whether (a) the type of parasport narrative and (b) identification with characters influence parasport participation. This online, longitudinal randomized controlled trial was completed by 194 Canadian adults with a physical disability who currently do not participate in parasport. Participation entailed completing quantitative surveys pre, post, and two weeks following three consecutive days of viewing a set of media messages capturing one of the three parasport narratives or control messages and completing thought listing tasks. The findings suggest that the discovery narrative may have an advantage in promoting parasport participation. Most participants (45%) preferred the discovery narrative, and chi-square analyses and repeated-measures ANOVAs revealed that the discovery narrative encouraged more positive thinking about the self (X2=6.32, p=.042) and about parasport (X2=5.95, p=.05), and led to increased barrier self-efficacy (F=6.89, p=.002). Intentions, risk perceptions, and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity increased regardless of narrative viewed (p<.05). Identification with characters was revealed as an important component of parasport behaviour change with task self-efficacy (R2=0.17) and outcome expectancies (R2=0.19) mediating the relationship between identification with characters and intentions to participate in parasport. Despite the importance of identification with characters, participants in all intervention groups expressed feeling dissimilar to the characters in the messages in terms of their competitiveness, elite status, and body types. This finding emphasizes the importance of including characters who persons with physical disabilities can identify with in parasport media. This work presents important considerations for researchers and parasport communicators who aim to develop inclusive messaging that facilitates parasport participation among persons with physical disabilities.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".