Building a capacity for equity, diversity, and inclusion through research, practice, and collaboration

Within Canada, individuals who participate in sports and/or physical activity have diverse backgrounds and lived experiences. As such, it is important for sport and exercise psychology scholars and practitioners to acknowledge this diversity and ensure their work is equitable and inclusive for all. In this presentation, we reflect on our personal experiences conducting diversity research and our efforts to advance equity, diversity, and inclusion in sport and exercise psychology. We begin the presentation by providing guidance for how to conduct diversity research. Specifically, we highlight the importance of accurately defining diversity and introduce methods for conceptualizing and measuring specific diversity characteristics. Second, we discuss how we bring equity into our practices as sport and exercise psychology practitioners. Drawing from our experiences working with high performance teams, we discuss how to collaborate with coaches and athletes to create equitable experiences and emphasize the importance of considering athletes' intersecting identities (e.g., age, ability, sexuality, ethnicity). Finally, we conclude the presentation by speaking about facilitating inclusion through collaboration. Specifically, we use our own collaborative relationships to illustrate how valuing deep-level similarities (e.g., values, work ethic) can make for more rewarding and gratifying professional and personal relationships among individuals who may have surface-level differences (e.g., ethnicity, gender). Taken together, it is our hope that this presentation encourages scholars/practitioners to reflect on their own work and promotes discussion about how to best advance equity, diversity, and inclusion in sport and exercise psychology.