Disasters and catastrophes: the impact on people with disabilities’ leisure-time physical activity participation and associative mental health and well-being

ABSTRACT

Disasters disrupt people’s ability to be physically active. Despite the well-known health benefits of physical activity, there is limited understanding of how disasters may affect those who experience constraints to being active, such as people with disabilities. This study explored how one major disaster, the COVID-19 pandemic, affected people with disabilities’ participation in leisure-time physical activity (LTPA) and their mental health and well-being. An online survey was completed by 959 participants. Latent class analysis based on four questions asking the impact of COVID-19 on LTPA was used to identify 4 distinct classes: ‘Heavily Impacted’, ‘Adapted’, ‘Resilient’, and ‘Radically Changed’. Disability categorisation, veteran status, and gender predicted latent class membership. Results from multinomial regression revealed that the Heavily Impacted members reported significantly lower mean scores for life satisfaction, quality of life, and general health, along with poorer mean scores for loneliness than other groups. In contrast, the Resilient members reported significantly higher mean scores of quality of life and general health than other groups. Qualitative data analysis further suggests that respondents participated in myriad LTPA modes that included somewhat technology adoption. People with disabilities’ LTPA was negatively affected by the pandemic, with those most heavily impacted having poorer mental health indices.

KEYWORDS:

• Adaptive sport
• constraints negotiation theory
• COVID-19
• pandemic
• military veterans
• online programming

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Julia Ray and Cayla Hammaker from Move United for their assistance with the project. No financial disclosures were reported by the authors of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jules Woolf

Jules Woolf’s research focuses on the role of sport in human development and augmentation. In particular, he is interested in the nexus between sport and health and how the management of sport may promote positive, and prevent negative, health and wellness outcomes. In his research, he strives to understand the issues that enable sport to be a positive transformative experience that promotes health and wellbeing and avoids negative behaviors such as the use and abuse of drugs. To achieve this, he adopts a critical perspective to explore and challenge the assumptions that pervade sport, with the goal to then prescribe policies and practices that better enable sport to deliver on its promise as a true benefit to society.

Wonju Lee

Wonju Lee is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Recreation, Sport and Tourism and pursuing a graduate minor in statistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research examines non-profit community sport management. Specifically, he is interested in the design and structure of sport for individual and community development and the promotion of community sport organizations’ capacity and performance. He has been involved in multiple research projects on these areas at a variety of sport contexts, including community sport organizations, adaptive sport, and youth sport.

Mikihiro Sato

Miki Sato earned a PhD in business administration from Temple University and earned master's degrees in business administration and sports administration from Ohio University. His primary line of research focuses on the role of sport in promoting well-being. He has conducted research in the contexts of participatory sport events, spectator sport events, and Olympic Games. He has also conducted research about the role of leisure-time physical activity in promoting health and well-being. Prior to entering academia, he worked for the sport and media industry for 10 years.

Jon Welty Peachey

Jon Welty Peachey's research centers upon sport-for-development and social change, particularly examining inclusive leadership strategies, program design modalities, and program impact. He applies this research focus by working with community-based and non-governmental organizations that use sport for development purposes, to help determine effective leadership strategies and programmatic and structural design features that are sensitive to cultural contexts and the individuals served by the programs. He also works with these organizations to examine how their programs and events can be leveraged for community impact and development.