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On being "head strong": The pain zone and concussion in non-elite rugby union

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-03-30, 13:17 authored by Katie Liston, Mark McDowell, Dominic MalcolmDominic Malcolm, Andrea Scott-Bell, Ivan Waddington
In recent years there has been growing concern about concussion in sport in general and rugby union in particular. The qualitative study reported here draws on interviews (n=20) with adult players in non-elite club rugby union in Ireland in order to explore the frames of reference within which they perceive, give meaning to and manage concussion. Within a sporting subculture which emphasises lay sporting values – particularly the value of “playing hurt” – and which reflects a functional view of injury, non-elite players tend to display an irreverent attitude towards concussion which encourages risky behaviours and underplays, ignores or denies the significance of concussion. We analogously describe these beliefs and actions as being “head strong”. The paper concludes by identifying the contextual contingencies which make the regulation of injuries in rugby union so difficult and by establishing some core principles of public health education campaigns that might be deployed to militate against the high incidence of concussive injury in future.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

International Review for the Sociology of Sport

Citation

LISTON, K. ...et al., 2017. On being "head strong": The pain zone and concussion in non-elite rugby union. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 53(6), pp. 668-684.

Publisher

© The Authors. Published by Sage.

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2017

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal International Review for the Sociology of Sport and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1012690216679966

ISSN

1012-6902

eISSN

1461-7218

Language

  • en