Peers
Youth concussion in Canada an extreme public health concern. Concussions have increases “10.3% between 2004 and 2015” (10) among Canadian youth aged 12 to 17; high school students experience the highest’s rates of concussion among all children and youth. It is found that youth concussions are under-reported. The reason for this, is that it is suspected to be due to high-school students having a lack of understanding about concussion, this is influenced by their social environment believing that reporting a concussion is not worth it. These teenagers often are concerned about how their peers would react and experience a lack of self-efficacy. Adolescents are strongly influenced by their social networks, peer education can play a large part in a students’ understanding, attitudes and intended behaviours. For example, if an individual experienced a concussion during football training but his social network (friend group) they are more likely to ignore the importance of the concussion.
Gender
Research has shown that women have almost two times greater risk for sports-related concussion than men do when playing sports such as soccer, basketball, and softball. Not only this, but research also shows that women report more symptoms and that their neurocognitive function and physiological recoveries are more severe than men. Women are often seen to show more interest and concern regarding their physical health and wellbeing which could be being represented in data showing that females report more symptoms after a concussion. However, female athletes are 1.7 times more cognitively impaired than male concussed athletes, reaction time and visual memory tasks were noted to be harder for women post sports-related concussion, and overall, these symptoms take longer to resolve in women than in men.
SES
It is continuously reported in “both quantitative and qualitative studies that people with higher SES are more likely than those with lower SES to participate in PA” (12), specifically in sport. A qualitative study in the Netherlands, USA as well as the Republic of Koreas found that cost was articulated consistently throughout as a barrier to physical activity participation; individual and household SES and neighbourhood SES is also related to physical activity participation. Evidence also shows that neighbourhoods with a higher SES provide a significant number of facilities successfully promoting opportunities for individuals to participate in more physical activity compared to neighbourhoods with a lower SES and lack such facilitation. Not only this, it is found that “adolescent athletes who reported a prior concussion history had lower family-level affluence than athletes without concussion history” (13). This could be because athletes with lower SES due to the differences in coaching, equipment access, adoption of safe play practices, and a lack of parents or coaching education. It is suspected that concussions young athletes have experienced are sustained outside of school settings where there is a lack of supervision and safety measures taken place.