Article Text
Abstract
Objective We undertook this qualitative study within an international circus company—Cirque du Soleil—to explore the narrative of artists and the artistic team in regards to injuries and their prevention and to describe the prevention of injuries from a systems thinking lens.
Methods Focus groups (FG) with artists and semistructured individual interviews with the artistic team were conducted in six selected shows. The structure of the interviews and FGs concerned the themes: ‘injury’, ‘injury-related factors’ and ‘injury prevention’. Data were analysed through comparative data analysis based on Grounded Theory. Concept mapping and systems thinking approaches were used to design a map of participants’ views on how to prevent injuries.
Results Injury was mainly described based on performance limitation. The factors mostly mentioned to be related to injury occurrence were physical load factors. Many of these factors were said to be connected and to influence each other. Injury prevention was mapped as a multilevel system, composed by artist-related factors (eg, technique and life style) and extrinsic factors (eg, touring conditions and equipment) that integrate different strategies and stakeholders.
Conclusion Our study reinforces the importance of multilevel injury prevention approaches with shared responsibility and open communication among stakeholders.
- prevention
- injuries
- qualitative
- elite performance
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Contributors CB developed the reasoning for this paper and drafted the first version. JM, EV, WvM and HRP contributed intellectually and provided feedback on various drafts.
Funding CB is a PhD candidate supported by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico–CNPq, Brazil, grant number 202242/2015-3. No other sources of funding were used to assist in the preparation of this article.
Competing interests CB and JM are former employees of Cirque du Soleil. EV is a consultant of Cirque du Soleil.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Ethics approval This study was approved by VU University Medical Center Ethics Committee, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; protocol METc FWA00017598.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.