Speakers
Description
Career development in sport is a well-established research field. Scholars have investigated entry and exit processes, different career phases and critical transitions in athletes. Further, social scientists have conceptualised athletic careers as social phenomena, situated in times and contexts. This understanding has drawn attention to the role sport systems and policies, gender, and ethnicity, and more recently athlete learning, and embodiment play in shaping athletes’ pathways in and through sport. While this research has over the last decades resulted in a comprehensive body of knowledge on able-body athletes, career research in para-sport athletes is still ‘a field in the making’.
To gain a comprehensive overview of the emerging research, the aim of this paper is to summarize current social science research on career development in Paralympic sport. More specifically, we will focus on specifics of Paralympic careers and the micro and macro conditions of their development. To reach this aim, a search string combining Paralympic and career development key words will be established. A sport science specific and two general data bases will be searched for peer-reviewed articles published between 2001-2021. Articles selected for their relevance will be analysed considering the research aim.
The knowledge generated from this review can provide stakeholders in sport with a deeper understanding of the distinctness of Paralympic careers and inform the design of target-group specific support programmes and policies. Scholars can gain insight in the existing lines of inquiry and identify needs for future research in the field of Paralympic sports.
