Abstract
Zusammenfassung Special Olympics ist die größte Sportorganisation für Menschen mit geistiger Behinderung. Bei den Special Olympics World Games 2019 war Special Olympics Deutschland mit zwei Handballteams vertreten, einem Frauen Traditional-Team und einem Unified-Team (bestehend aus Menschen mit und ohne Behinderung). Die Mitglieder beider Teams wurden aus mehreren Bewerber*innen bei Sichtungslehrgängen ausgewählt und bereiteten sich anschließend in Trainingslagern auf die World Games vor. Diese Prozesse wurden mithilfe von teilnehmenden Beobachtungen und Leitfaden gestützten Interviews mit den Spieler*innen und Trainer*innen wissenschaftlich begleitet und evaluiert. Die Ergebnisse offenbaren ein Spannungsfeld zwischen sportlichem Erfolgswunsch und sozialer Unterstützung, in dem sich die Teilnehmer*innen bewegen.
Highlights
The members of both teams were selected from several applicants at various try-outs and prepared in training camps for the World Games
It becomes clear that a selection process in the context of Special Olympics has to be adapted closely to the needs of the target group
Playing with and against each other in a competitive setting only seems possible if the participants have similar sport-specific skills. This can generally be assumed to be valid for all sports games (Dietrich 1986), and the statutes of the competitive model of Unified Sports expressly request such a setting (Special Olympics Germany 2015)
Summary
This study has two intertwined research interests. On the one hand, it examines the selection criteria of the coaches, while we investigate how the participants interpret and experience this try-out process. They critically reflected the procedures in training or non-sport-related events as well as the research process and adapted the interview guidelines This procedure led to optimizations of the approach during fieldwork. We chose the procedures of the “Grounded Theory” methodology (Strauss and Corbin 1996) This is due to the fact that subjective perspectives are at the center of our research interest and we focus on “understanding individual action and experiences, [as well as] subjective interpretations of the self, the world and others” (Mey and Mruck 2009: 102). The knowledge gained after the first rounds of open coding and the phenomena, or rather the developed categories (provisionally) classified as relevant were differentiated and substantiated more precisely by further data collection and axial coding In this circular process, the researchers jointly coded the data and discussed the results continuously. A more thorough and critical analysis of the phenomena is possible
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