Speakers
Description
Scholarly attention of sports-related concussions (SRC) has developed a growing body of research on the injury. An emergent domain of this research has been from a sociocultural perspective, employing the lived experience of athletes who have sustained a concussion to understand how athletic populations manage reporting and recovery despite the complexity of the injury. It is important to continue to explore this topic within various populations to expand knowledge to all those affected in the broad sports community. In an attempt to do so, we investigated post-secondary athletes’ understanding of SRC through a sociocultural lens utilizing qualitative, interview-driven data. Participants consisted of seven athletes competing in basketball, volleyball, or hockey at a Western Canadian institution. Findings from the interviews highlighted factors that shape post-secondary SRC injury management such as the sport ethic and long-standing attitudes about injury associated with socialization into sport culture, intrinsic and extrinsic pressures, availability of concussion education, the priority placed on academic work, and the dynamics of athletic injury and mental health. Utilizing athlete voices, this exploration of SRC centers the role of social and cultural processes of sport among the implemented protocols guided by biomedical SRC research so that scholars may seek to understand the processes that guide the injury experience, and reporting and recovery protocols may account for the sociocultural ramifications of SRC.
