Absent but not uninterested: understanding charity sport event non-participation through capability and practice theories
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Charity sport events are widely used to raise funds and foster community around cancer-related causes, yet many cancer survivors choose not to participate. This lack of participation by some individuals reduces the amount of funds raised by charitable organizations, and precludes engagement in a potentially impactful sport experience. Previous research has largely explained this absence as a lack of motivation, offering little insight into the emotional, symbolic, and structural dynamics that underlie non-participation. Guided by the capability approach and practice theory, this study examined how survivors construct and negotiate their capacity for participation, emphasizing how capability, readiness, and meaning are shaped through personal, social, and environmental conditions. Data were collected through open-ended survey questions via the Prolific platform in June 2024 from 78 U.S. based cancer survivors who had never attended a charity sport event. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Findings show that non-participation is rarely driven by a lack of interest. Instead, participants described engagement as contingent on health and fatigue, emotional and temporal readiness, social comfort and support, moral trust in fundraising organizations, and the practical and symbolic design of events. These conditions informed the advancement of three related concepts: situated capability, latent willingness, and conditional participation to explain how engagement occurs only when material, symbolic, and relational elements align. Practically, event organizers should offer flexible and low-impact participation options, transparent communication about fund use, emotionally sensitive messaging, and alternative roles that allow meaningful contribution without physical or public demands.
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 | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".