Participants in Behavior-Analytic Sports Studies: Can Anybody Play?
Behavior analysts study plenty of female athletes but almost none with developmental disabilities—time to widen the team roster.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Rotta’s team read every behavior-analytic sports paper they could find. They pulled 95 studies published between 1980 and 2018. They counted who got to play: girls, boys, kids, adults, and anyone with a developmental disability.
What they found
Girls showed up in almost half the studies—great news for gender balance. Only five studies, though, included athletes with developmental disabilities. That is 5 % of the whole pile.
How this fits with other research
Zhou et al. (2018) saw the same hole in motor-skill research. They found just one strong study for kids with disabilities in 30 years. The two reviews overlap: both say our field rarely tests athletes who have developmental delays.
Fiorilli et al. (2013) shows why this matters. Their wheelchair-basketball players felt happier and more connected than non-players. Sport can boost mental health, but behavior analysts are not studying the athletes who may benefit most.
Antezana et al. (2019) reminds us that gender details count too. They found girls with autism show different repetitive behaviors than boys. Rotta adds that girls are already well-represented in sports studies, so we can now turn the same lens toward disability.
Why it matters
If you run sports programs, start inviting athletes with developmental disabilities and collect data. Simple adaptations—shorter drills, visual supports, or peer models—can open the door. Publishing those results will close the gap Rotta flagged and give future BCBAs real guidance.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Participating in athletics confers a wide range of benefits, regardless of participants’ gender or disability status. Our review of 95 behavior-analytic sports-performance articles revealed that over half of them included at least 1 female participant, but only 5 included at least 1 participant with a reported developmental disability. Given that females are often underrepresented as research participants, and that female athletes face unique barriers, it is heartening that so many articles involved female participants. Moreover, there were more female than male participants overall. However, it is surprising and distressing that so few articles involved participants with a developmental disability. Participating in sports can be a lifelong source of fitness, friends, and fun. Practitioners should encourage people of all ages, races, and genders, and from all disability categories, to find a sport they like, to learn to do it well enough to enjoy it, and to do it regularly. Researchers should give them the tools necessary to make those efforts as easy, and as fruitful, as possible. Nothing but good can come from these efforts.
Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2020 · doi:10.1007/s40617-020-00477-0