English summery Living with cerebral palsy (CP) can affect many parts of one's life from early childhood to late adulthood. Thus, having CP also means becoming affiliated with the health system and thereby offering a range of treatment and rehabilitation programs. However, in Denmark and many other wealthy countries, only systematic and coordinated programs are offered until the day the young person with CP turns 18. The majority of these programs specifically focus on how to best support and improve the individual’s physical functioning, which means that these important types of programs are well established and have a strong knowledge base. However, less attention has been given to interventions aimed at dealing with the psychosocial challenges of living with CP. Hence, this thesis aims to elucidate the impact of integrating physical and psychosocial aspects in the design and primary objective of an intervention for young people and adults with CP. This is done by using a phenomenological inspired approach to examine the experiences of young people and adults with CP who participated in a holistic resilience-based sports camp intervention designed by the Elsass Foundation. This thesis elucidates which aspects of the participants’ experience are meaningful for the participants’ physical and psychosocial development.
Study 1 focusses on how the participants experience being part of a group of similarly disposed individuals. The participants described feeling that they belonged to the group and that they were safe in the group. They described feeling a sense of positive group synergy in which there was symmetry between the abilities of the individual group members and a shared understanding of what living with CP means. Together, these dimensions resulted in the participants believing more in themselves and in daring to be more vulnerable and to participate actively in the challenges they were given.
Study 2 deals with how the participants experience participating in the challenging adapted physical activities of the sports camp. The participants found the activities to be very different and challenging when compared to their everyday activities and traditional rehabilitation interventions. By participating in the activities, the participants learned to see themselves, their disability and their abilities in a new light.
Study 3 examines how participating in a sports camp affects the lives of participants after the camp. The participants described how the camp had positively changed their everyday lives in two ways. First, they were able to implement some of the elements from the camp when 11
