Sport Injury Psychology

Cultural, Relational, Methodological, and Applied Considerations

Ross Wadey, Ross Wadey

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000208481
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: Sports Psychology

Written by a team of international experts and emerging talents from around the world, Sport Injury Psychology: Cultural, Relational, Methodological, and Applied Considerations challenges the status quo of the field of sport injury psychology and opens new and exciting future research trajectories by critically considering:

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• How to evolve from an individual focused and single, scientific discipline into a cultural and relational focused and interdisciplinary discourse

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• How to shift from the dominant positivist foundation towards a more inclusive scholarship with divergent epistemologies, theories, and methodologies

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• How to replace the attempt to establish 'best practice' and desire for 'clean' findings with the need for continuous innovation and multifaceted applied experiences

Each chapter stimulates debate and encourages theoretical, methodological, and/or applied diversification, and closes with future research directions that provide novel and rigorous programs of research that have the potential to advance the field of sport injury psychology into an interdisciplinary discourse that strives for and embraces collaboration between academic disciplines and with practitioners working in the field. Cutting edge, timely, and comprehensive, Sport Injury Psychology: Cultural, Relational, Methodological, and Applied Considerations is essential reading for undergraduate students, postgraduate students, and more established scholars in the fields of sport communication, sports medicine, sport psychology, sports sociology, and other related sport science disciplines.

1 Narratives Matter!

Storying Sport Injury Experiences

Toni L. Williams

Introduction

Stories are everywhere: in the books we read, in the songs we listen to, in the ­movies we watch, in the media we engage with, and in our conversations with others. Importantly, formulating and sharing stories helps people create an identity and sense of self, while also bringing meaning and coherence to our lives (Charmaz, 1999; Crossley, 2000). Through a narrative lens, it is understood that although we tell unique stories of our own personal experiences, we draw upon dominant sociocultural narratives to structure our tales (Frank, 2013). Thus, the stories out there – in the locker room, on the sports field, embedded within social and cultural settings – act as narrative resources to make sense of experiences such as sport injury. Yet limited research attention has been afforded to the social-cultural context in sport injury psychology. Answering calls for future research in this area (Wadey, Day, Cavallerio, & Martinelli, 2019; Wiese-Bjornstal, 2010), this chapter will provide a brief description and overview of narrative before turning to the possibilities narrative inquiry can offer in understanding the impact of injury through sport. Here, two examples are drawn upon to illustrate how different sociocultural narrative types can shape interpretations of sport injury. Finally, the importance of taking a narrative approach in the professional practice of sport injury psychology (and beyond) is critically discussed with suggestions for further research within this field.

Why do Narratives Matter?

Narrative is a form of inquiry that has been extensively used to interpret the embodied experience of illness and injury. This is because narratives are essential means by which people make sense of their lives and experiences. As Frank (2013) explains, serious illness and injury represent a loss in the destination and map that have previously guided an individual’s life. For example, for athletes, sporting injuries may result in losing a medal, not qualifying for a major event, the premature end of an athletic career, or even permanent disability. These experiences bring disruption and confusion into people’s lives as an imagined future is no longer possible. Accordingly, telling stories is a way that people make sense of experience, produce and maintain a sense of identity, and reconstruct a sense of order in their lives disrupted by illness and injury (Charmaz, 1999; Crossley, 2000; Frank, 2010, 2013).

Before exploring the role of narrative in shaping interpretations of sport injury, it is important to expand upon what narrative is. First, humans have been widely accepted as storytellers, and therefore this forms an underlying assumption that people lead storied lives (Crossley, 2000; Phoenix & Sparkes, 2006). In other words, people express themselves through stories and make sense of their lives and experiences by telling stories. Second, people transmit meaning by telling stories, and understanding meaningful experience is a central component of narrative inquiry. As Garro and Mattingly (2000) explain, “Narrative is a fundamental human way of giving meaning to experience. In both telling and interpreting experiences; narrative mediates between an inner world of thought–feeling and an outer world of observable actions and states of affairs” (p. 1). Similarly, Mayer (2014) suggests “Stories imbue our experience with ‘meaning’. Events become meaningful to the extent that they can be fit into or evoke some larger narrative about ourselves or our world… It is impossible to say who we are without telling a story” (p. 7).

Third, narratives are conceptualized as both personal and sociocultural. The stories people tell about their lives convey, express, and formulate personal thoughts and feelings in relation to particular experiences. Yet while these experiences are personal to the individual, the stories people tell are socially and culturally constructed (Frank, 2013). As Phoenix and Sparkes (2006) illuminate:

People resort to a mode of telling with which they feel familiar. In this sense, narrative is a form of social practice in which individuals draw from a cultural repertoire of stories that they then assemble into personal stories … . It is through this social aspect of narrative that the dominant narratives available in culture may act to shape not only who we think we are, but also who we think we can become in the future.

(p. 109)

Therefore, the dominant narratives available in society and culture – the stories that are widely retold in this context – act as a resource, or template, which people can draw upon to tell their own stories (Frank, 2010). Here, a useful distinction between narrative and story can be made. Broadly speaking, a narrative can be understood as “a complex genre that routinely contains a point and characters along with a plot connecting events that unfold sequentially over time and in space to provide an overarching explanation or consequence” (Smith & Sparkes, 2009a, p. 2). Stories on the other hand, are individual tales, or specific acts of telling, constructed from narratives that social relations, culture, and society make available to us. This is not to suggest that people do not have agency in telling their own stories. Rather, people adapt established and recognizable narrative resources to tell individual tales (Frank, 2013). The distinction between narrative and story can be hard to sustain as “narratives only exist in particular stories, and all stories are narratives” (Frank, 2013, p. 224). Yet, this distinction between narrative and story is valuable to “recognise the uniqueness of each individual story, while at the same time understanding how individuals do not make up stories by themselves” (Frank, 2010, p. 119).

Fourth, narratives are not only resources for telling personal stories; they are also actors, in that they do things on, in, for, and with us (Frank, 2010). In other words, narratives are crucial actors in helping create and shape experiences through the ordering of events. Stories have a capacity to act in a way that guides and informs our actions and future possibilities. For example, stories work for people by providing a map or destination to follow, and act on people by teaching what to pay attention to and how to respond to certain actions. As Frank (2010) describes:

People do not simply listen to stories. They become caught up, a phrase that can only be explained by another metaphor: stories get under people’s skin. Once stories are under people’s skin, they affect the terms in which people think, know and perceive.

(p. 48)

Furthermore, as Mayer (2014) illustrates, “stories motivate our actions. When we act we are often to a great extent enacting, we are acting out the story as the script demands, acting in ways that are meaningful in the context of some story” (p. 7).

A Narrative Approach to Sport Injury

The dominant narratives that circulate within society and culture influence our understanding of health and performance. These stories circulating “out there” are extremely powerful resources for framing experiences of sport injury. For example, within sporting contexts, Douglas and Carless (2006, 2009) identified the performance narrative as a dominant cultural script which shapes and constrains elite sport experience (i.e., sport is life, life is sport). The performance narrative storyline reflects a single-minded dedication to winning where sacrifice, discipline, and pain are accepted in the quest for success, and feelings of shame accompany failure. Athletes have been shown to go to extreme lengths to align their lives to the performance narrative, including identity foreclosure, compromising education, reduced family time and social relationships (Carless & Douglas, 2013; Douglas & Carless, 2009). Thus, when an athlete becomes ill or injured, and personal embodied experiences fail to align with the culturally dominant performance narrative, sense of self, athletic identity, and mental well-being can be threatened.

The narrative resources available in society and culture are therefore important in helping people regain a sense of coherence following the disruption to their lives through life-threatening events or unexpected crisis (Crossley, 2000). For example, Bury (1982) conceptualized chronic illness as a form of biographical disruption as illness ruptures the structure of everyday life. Similarly, when sport injury breaks our anticipated life path – such as losing out on being selected for the Olympic Games or sustaining catastrophic injury through sport – our narratives lose coherence. As a result, meaning and identity as a sport person are also lost (Douglas & Carless, 2006, 2009). Thus, people need to create new stories, and reconstruct their narrative and identity, to regain coherence in their life stories following illness or injury.

One of the most comprehensive narrative studies on experiences of illness comes from Arthur Frank and his influential work The Wounded Storyteller ([1995], 2013). Through an in-depth and prolonged exploration of experiences of cancer, Frank identified three broad narrative typologies that underpin stories of illness. These were restitution, chaos, and quest. In brief, Frank proposed that the restitution narrative is the metanarrative of modern Western culture with a basic storyline of “Yesterday I was healthy, today I’m sick, but tomorrow I’ll be healthy again” (p. 77). In stories of restitution, the ill or injured individual is seeking to regain their former healthy self. As Frank contends: “For the individual teller, the ending is to return to just before the beginning: ‘good as new’ or status quo ante. For the culture that prefers restitution stories, this narrative affirms that breakdowns can be fixed” (p. 90). Chaos on the other hand, is the opposite of restitution. Following injury or illness, chaos narratives envisage life never getting better:

Stories are chaotic in their absence of narrative order. Events are told as the storyteller experiences life: without sequence or discernible causality. The lack of coherent sequence is an initial reason why chaos stories are harder to hear; the teller is not understood as telling a “proper” story. But more significantly, the teller of the chaos story is not heard to be living a “proper” life, since life as in story, one event is expected to lead to another.

(Frank, 2013, p. 97)

Finally, the quest narrative differs from both restitution and chaos in that the individual seeks to gain something positive from their illness or injury experience. Accordingly,

quest stories meet suffering head on; they accept illness and seek to use it … What is quested for may never be wholly clear, but the quest is defined by the ill person’s belief that something is to be gained from the experience.

(Frank, 2013, p. 115)

Many authors have drawn upon Frank’s theoretical framework to interpret unexpected events such as sport injury. Two examples are illustrated below. The first features the story of acquiring a spinal cord injury and becoming disabled through playing sport. The second draws upon the story of an elite athlete whose injuries prevent him from qualifying for the Olympic Games.

Becoming Disabled Through Sport: The Case of Spinal Cord Injury

Smith and Sparkes (2005) conducted a life history study of a small group of men who suffered a spinal cord injury (SCI...

Índice

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: Challenging the Status Quo of Sport Injury Psychology
• 1 Narratives Matter!: Storying Sport Injury Experiences
• 2 Sport Media Research: Examining the Benefits for Sport Injury Psychology and Beyond
• 3 Gender Matters!: How Can Sociocultural Perspectives on Pain, Injury, and the Sporting Body Benefit Future Research in Sport Injury Psychology?
• 4 Sport-Related Concussion: Critical Reflections, Methodological Musings, and New Research Directions
• 5 Pain and Injury: From the Unidimensional to the Multidimensional
• 6 “Slim-To-Win” to Injury: How Swimmers are Engaging With “Health Risk” Culture Due to Entrenched Body Ideals
• 7 “What Doesn’t Kill Us, Makes Us Stronger”: Do Injured Athletes Really Experience Growth?
• 8 Time to Re-Examine Injured Athletes’ Emotional Responses
• 9 Physiotherapist–Injured-Athlete Relationship: Toward a Cultural and Relational Understanding
• 10 Guilt Experienced by Coaches Following Athlete Injury
• 11 My Daughter’s Injured Again! : I Just Don’t Know What to Do Anymore
• 12 But We’ve Always Done It This Way: The Future of Qualitative Injury Research
• 13 Experimental Psychological Response to Injury Studies: Why So Few?
• 14 Introducing Knowledge Translation Into the Field of Sport Injury Psychology: The Art of Improving Research Uptake in Practice
• 15 “But It Is Bad!” “Yes, But Is It Really as Bad as You Have Indicated on Here?” “Absolutely!” : Challenging Injured Athletes’ Irrational Beliefs: Not a Straightforward Exercise
• 16 Less Control, More Flexibility: Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy With Injured Athletes
• 17 “This Is the Final Jump,” I Respond. Why, Why Do I Utter Those Words? : Using Storytelling in Sport Injury Rehabilitation
• 18 Textbooks Don’t Tell It Like It Is: Tales From Working in the Field With Injured Athletes
• 19 Three Decades Later: Looking Back to Look Forward
• Index