"I like that you can hit a guy and not really get in trouble": Young ice hockey players' experiences with body checking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Intense debate continues to surround the optimal age to integrate body checking in youth ice hockey, particularly following Hockey Canada’s landmark decision in May 2013, to increase the minimum age for body checking in competitive male hockey leagues from 11 to 13. While extensive research suggests body checking is associated with heightened injury rates (e.g., Emery et al., 2010; Warsh et al., 2009), little research has focused on the psychological and social risks of body checking among youth players. The purpose of this study was to understand young hockey players’ initial experiences with body checking, through the lens of psychosocial development. Thirty-four male Peewee (age 11-12) hockey players from nine competitive (representative) teams in southern Ontario, Canada engaged in semi-structured interviews at the beginning and conclusion of their 2011-2012 season. A phenomenological approach was used in the collection and analysis of data (Moustakas, 1990), offering textural and structural descriptions of how participants experienced body checking. Results emerged in four key categories: (a) new reality of injury, (b) aggression, power, invincibility, and fear, (c) coaches’ roles and (d) parents’ influences. Findings are discussed in the context of the complex power dynamics that exist within the ‘new’ game (i.e., which includes body checking) and the need to look beyond the prevalence of physical injuries resulting from body checking. Future research is recommended focusing on assuring optimal developmental experiences for youth, particularly in light of changing policies.Acknowledgments: Support for this project was given by doctoral and standard research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Sport Canada Research Initiative).
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 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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".