Special Olympics and serious leisure

Abstract

Those who engage in serious leisure activities (such as sports) gain a sense of achievement, an increase in self esteem, stress reduction, skill acquisition, and an enhanced level of self-confidence. They also deepen their social relationships, form friendships, expand their social networks and have an enhanced social life. In addition, serious leisure participants are engaged in a ‘social world’ that has its own actors, organisations and practices (Unruh, 1979). Using social worlds as a research lens can enable us to understand the mechanisms that deliver benefits for subjective wellbeing. To date, social world theory has not been applied within the context of intellectually disabled people’s leisure experiences. Disabled people have been overlooked by leisure and event studies researchers in the past, but there is now an emerging body of work investigating their experiences. Music events (Bossey, 2020, 2024; Dinis et al., 2020; Alvarado, 2022), sporting events (dos Santos Neto et al., 2019; McGillivray et al., 2019), rural events (Sage & Flores, 2019) and arts events (Walters, 2023) have all featured. However, it is predominantly the voices of people with physical disabilities who have been heard in these studies: the experiences of people with intellectual isabilities, who are frequently subject to societal narratives of ‘no vision, no future, no contribution, a burden on others’ (Mullen & Wills, 2016, p. 6), have largely been neglected. This UK-based project addresses these gaps in our understanding, adopting social world theory as the lens through which to investigate the importance of sport as serious leisure for intellectually disabled people. Specifically, this qualitative project seeks to answer the research question, “How does participation in the social world of Special Olympics contribute to quality of life for athletes with intellectual disabilities and their wider networks?” Preliminary findings from the analysis of semi-structured interviews will be presented.