Life stories of Argentinian Paralympic athletes. Networks of Relations

Abstract

The growing interest in gender studies shows a gap regarding women with disabilities who have developed successful careers in any field. This work is part of two investigations about female athletes with physical disabilities who have achieved the highest sporting achievement: Paralympic medals. In order to reveal their Biographical Trajectories, a flexible and multivocal study was designed with a non-standard (qualitative) approach focused on the biographical method. Thirteen life stories were collected in-depth interviews analyzed with the constant comparative method of Grounded Theory.
The Biographical Trajectories are "large areas of social experience" that provide evidence of individual experiences within a social object (Bertaux, 2005: 41). But because of design features, an unexpected category emerged: networks of relations, constituted by the mutual influences of the interactions between people, are the reason for this presentation. What was interesting was that these networks not only did not respond to the role of dependence attributed to people with disabilities, but a new type was found and four sub-categories: compulsory, elective, omitted and ignored. Mainly in elective networks was where the interviewees expressed to find niches where expressed (discovered) roles and functions (concurrent and changing) complementary and cooperative with others, while maintaining a degree of internal independence (limits). The weight of the networks (attributed importance) was variable both synchronously and diachronically, allowing some athletes to be more emphasized on more than one network at different times of their lives.