The objective was to illuminate the experience of injuries and the process of injury reporting within the Swedish skydiving culture. Data contained narrative interviews that were subsequently analyzed with content analysis. Seventeen respondents (22–44 years) were recruited at three skydiving drop zones in Sweden. In the results injury events related to the full phase of a skydive were described. Risk of injury is individually viewed as an integrated element of the recreational activity counterbalanced by its recreational value. The human factor of inadequate judgment such as miscalculation and distraction dominates the descriptions as causes of injuries. Organization and leadership act as facilitators or constrainers for reporting incidents and injuries. On the basis of this study it is interpreted that safety work and incident reporting in Swedish skydiving may be influenced more by local drop zone culture than the national association regulations. Formal and informal hierarchical structures among skydivers seem to decide how skydiving is practiced, rules are enforced, and injuries are reported. We suggest that initial training and continuing education need to be changed from the current top-down to a bottom-up perspective, where the individual skydiver learns to see the positive implications of safety work and injury reporting. 1. Introduction Skydiving, sport parachuting from aircraft, engages more than 800,000 participants in over one hundred countries who make more than 6 million jumps per year. It is a competitive sport with national and international championships in several disciplines [1]. Skydiving can be viewed as an “extreme sport,” by being associated with a risk of death or serious injury [2]. Skydiving activities are dependent on rules and regulations issued by authorities, but it is also suggested that the policing role of more experienced skydivers sets limits of risk behavior to an even higher degree than formal regulations [3]. The risks associated with modern skydiving have not been satisfactorily described in the scientific literature. Because of lack of unified reporting systems and differences in definitions of injury, the reporting and comparisons of incidents and injuries are hard to make. Injury rates of 170 per 100,000 jumps with an accompanying hospital admission rate of 18 per 100,000 jumps have been reported from the United States [4] and similar rates have been reported from European countries [5–7]. In Sweden, an injury rate of 48 per 100,000 jumps has been reported [8]. Most countries in the world do not have reliable
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