Stories of physical activity and disability: exploring sport and exercise students’ narrative imagination through story completion

Sport and exercise students will form the next generation of sport, exercise and health practitioners tasked with supporting disabled people to be physically active. Yet, little is known about what these students imagine about physical activity and disability. This focus is important as university can be a narratively rich environment that offers pedagogical opportunities to understand and disrupt dangerous narratives around disability and amplify alternative narratives. The aim of this study was to explore sport and exercise students’ narrative imagination of physical activity and disability through the novel method of story completion. Ninety Uk-based participants wrote a story in response to one of four story stems. Following a rigorously applied holistic-form structural analysis, three principal narratives were identified across all stories: 1) incapability narrative; 2) supercrip narrative; and 3) social justice in sport narrative. Novel narrative insights highlighted the problematic dominant representations of disabled people in incapability and supercrip stories underpinned by an ableist ideology and emphasised the need to amplify counter-narrative resources to promote acts of social justice. This original empirical knowledge has the capacity to influence university education and expand the narrative resources available to sport and exercise students to talk about disability and improve interactions with disabled people. This article also makes an important methodological contribution by applying an innovative narrative analytical technique to story completion data, as well as advancing practical considerations and challenges guiding story completion design and implementation.