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# 4 What do you think about doping?

Now you’ll move on to consider your own opinions about doping. In the next activity you will think about your own position on doping to see how it relates to any new perspectives you read or view.

## Activity 4 Exploring your perspective

Allow about 20 minutes

#### Part 1

To get started, write three different words that you associate with doping in sport in the text box below. This is an anonymous activity – you will be able to see the most popular words among your fellow learners represented in an autogenerated word cloud; no one will be able to identify your individual response. You may want to revisit the word cloud later to see if the results change.

### Discussion

This is intended to raise your awareness of how you respond to the doping in sport issue.

The above initial impressions may be derived from why you think people dope and why you think it is a problem in sport. In the next part of the activity you will explore your perspective further, since it is interesting to explore your perspective further and see how it might inform how you evaluate doping.

#### Part 2

Respond to the following three poll questions according to your current beliefs and values. Again, all responses are anonymous. Once you have voted, you’ll be able to see how your responses compare to the other learners from this course.

### Discussion

Did any of the poll results surprise you? Some people think the drive that makes athletes dope is due to a desire to win or gain advantage, while others believe it is driven by a mix of individual, social, cultural and sports system factors. These questions force you into thinking about your position on doping, and when you hear and read views featured in this course, you will become more familiar with some of the main themes in the arguments about doping. You are also able to see how your position compares to other learners.

You have started to look at diverse opinions about the doping issue and you will now extend this to consider how debates about issues partly depend how they are shaped. This is called ‘framing an argument’.

◄Contents►Next: 5 Ways of framing debates about doping

OpenLearn - Doping: a contemporary sports issue case study
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