DISABILITYINTEGRATIO · What about the social acceptance of disabled athletes in Europe? A Comparative analysis of the Paralympics media coverage in the written press of Germany, England, Spain, Greece and France
FP6 — Marie Curie Actions (Human Resources and Mobility)
- Duration
- 2007-04-01 → 2008-03-31
- EU contribution
- €77,124
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- EIF
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Results in brief
Final Activity Report Summary - DISABILITYINTEGRATION (What about the social acceptance of disabled athletes in Europe? A Comparative analysis of the Paralympics media coverage in the written press)
The status of research on the field media coverage of athletes with disabilities is on the same situation as the visibility of disabled people in mainstream media; that is to say is conspicuous by its absence. To our knowledge, during the last 10 years only 4 papers had focused on the media treatment of paralympic athletes, two of them treated the televised coverage of American channel CBS (Schell & Duncan, 1999; Schell & Rodriguez, 2001) and the two remaining papers (Schantz and Gilbert, 2001; Thomas & Smith, 2003) concerned with the press coverage of paralympic games. The present project aimed to fill a gap in the literature by bringing to light data concerning the social acceptance through the media coverage allotted to elite athletes in Europe. Data were gathered from 10 broadsheet daily newspapers of wide national circulation, deriving from 5 European countries: El Pais & El Mundo (Spain), The Times & The Independent (England), Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung & Die Sueddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), Le Monde & Le Figaro (France), Ta Nea & Eleftherotipia (Greece). Both qualitative and quantitative approaches were employed in order to obtain a more complete picture of the issue. In sum, our quantitative analysis indicate a progressively increase of the media coverage of elite athletes with disabilities in all European countries studied in our sample. Between the newspapers of the five different countries, whose media coverage was studied in the present study, French newspapers were found to publish very few articles and texts following by Spain. Germany had a stable relatively fair coverage. The two mainstream newspapers from England (The Times and the Independent) allotted the most extensive coverage. The data from the Greek newspapers cannot be compared with the other rest of the four countries because Athens hosted the 2004 paralympic Games, and as a result journalists offered a significantly biggest amount of the Games. The qualitative part of the study offered evidence of stereotypical depictions of athletes with disabilities. Athletes often were depicted in passive positions, in a non-sport related context. Photographs showing emotional moments were frequently presented instead of showing athletes with disabilities in action, performing their athletic discipline. This kind of portrayals do not help change conventional, stereotyped images of disability seen as a sad, emotional, and over-dependent situation. Several linguistic elements connoting infantilisation were detected within the articles of our sample, but the novelty of this finding consists in the fact that childlike terms were applied to both female and male paralympic athletes. The results of this study were published in 5 Peer Reviewed Articles in International Journals. The preliminary results of this study have attracted the interest of academia, Dr. Pappous presented these results in several international conferences, including Spain, Greece, Colombia and Qatar. On the 5th of November 2007, Dr. Pappous gave a Conference in the XIV International Congress of the Faculty of Sport Organisation. His conference was titled "Some champions not like the 'others'": Stigmatisation et Media Invisibility of the Disabled Athletes". Dr. Pappous has been invited to expose the results of this Marie-Curie project in the 3nd International Conference "People with Disabilities and Mass Media" 2008, that will take place in Athens, from 23 to 24 of June 2008. In this event the findings of the present project will be highlighted in a key-note conference titled "The Media Image of Elite Athletes with Disabilities in Europe".
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
During the last two decades, there has been a significant increase in the enrolment of disabled people within the framework of adapted physical activities. Political and institutional actors are making an effort to reflect an idea of equal treatment between the able-body and disabled body. Under this logic, the organizing committee of the recent Olympic and Paralympic Games, Athens 2004 decided that athletes performed in the same stadiums, were hosted in the same Olympic village, under almost the same calendar, and finally it was the same staff that organized both organizations. However is worth questioning this discourse with the different perception of common sense of the people and the intuition that disabled athletes appear rarely in popular media.Scientific research, on the field of social psychology and sociology of disability, has produced evidence demonstrating that, disability is often associated with sentiments of pity, dependency and inability (Schantz, 2001). People with disabilities are the obje ct of negative social representations, and according the theoretical assumption of Goffman (1963) they undergo a kind of stigmatisation in our society. In one of the few studies that used photograph analysis, Hardin and Hardin (2004) observed that disabled people where depicted as almost always needing help assistance to participate in sports, reinforcing, that way, a stigmatised image of disabled people as dependant people.However, the studies that up to now have carried out photograph analysis present a lack of a clear methodological tool; most of the analysis is quite naive rather than based in a valid recording instrument. The completion of this study will come to fill this methodological gap through the development of a valid and reliable tool, based in the theory of the semiology of images. The resulting recording instrument will enable us to study the stigmatisation hypothesis
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITE MONTPELLIER 1 · MONTPELLIERCoordinatorCity levelFrance
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union