Sport Research Research Articles

The Importance of Sports Participation on Lithuanian Adolescents’ Social and Emotional Health

Abstract Global mental health rates are staggering. Youth mental health in sport is a topic with increasing research attention. To date, most youth sport research examines mental health from isolated events as opposed to a cumulative-assets framework. Our main research question examined sport participation group differences regarding four mental health domains; emotional competence, belief-in-others, belief-in-self, and engaged living, and the composite covitality meta-indicator. To answer our research questions, 1965 Lithuanian youths (60.10% female) ranging in age from 11 to 17 (M = 13.62, SD = 1.96) from urban and rural school districts completed our survey. Our results indicated many significant differences (p < 0.001) emerged for participant sex, age grouping, and sport participation (competitive, leisure, or none). Only for the sport participation were the MANOVA and ANOVA effect size values at least small in magnitude. In the follow-up analyses (all p’s < 0.001), the competitive group differed from the no sport group (effect sizes medium-to-large) and to the leisure participant group (effect sizes small) in all four mental health domains and the meta-indicator covitality. Small-to-medium effect size values resulted between the leisure and no sport groups. Sport participation, even for leisure, is related to improved self-reported social and emotional health in our large sample. The practical implication is clear that all governments and such bodies should provide accessible and affordable sport participation opportunities, whether competitive or recreational. Longitudinal research, as a future direction in sport contexts, will help to best understand and move forward with youth mental health.

Imagining sport in Lithuania: young athletes’ views on safe sport

Sports organisations have a moral and legal duty of care to deliver sport in a safe environment and to promote the welfare of athletes. This right to what has become known as ‘safe sport’ is now firmly established on the global policy agenda. Simultaneously, there is growing understanding of the need to engage with athletes, including those who are children and young people, and involve them in safe sport developments and research to ensure initiatives are effective and (child-) athlete-centred. However, to date most developments and research in this area have excluded athletes. The project presented here, in which researchers delivered a series of workshops on safe sport topics to current youth high-performance athletes in Lithuania, aimed to explore youth athletes’ views on the safe sport issues they consider most relevant to sport in their nation. Using a qualitative case study approach, data were generated through focus group interviews with 17 Lithuanian undergraduate student-athletes (average age 22) from sport-related degrees. Analysis identified doping, overtraining, emotional/psychological abuse, and corruption as the issues the young athletes consider most pertinent to their sporting lives. The project highlights the importance of working with current youth athletes to understand the issues they consider important to their experience to better enable sport policymakers and educators to develop relevant and meaningful safe sport training.

Where do we intervene to optimize sports systems? Leverage Points the way

ABSTRACT Sport and sports research are inherently complex systems. This appears to be somewhat at odds with the current research paradigm in sport in which interventions are aimed are fixing or solving singular broken components within the system. In any complex system, such as sport, there are places where we can intervene to change behaviour and, ideally, system outcomes. Meadows influential work describes 12 different points with which to intervene in complex systems (termed “Leverage Points”), which are ordered from shallow to deeper based on their potential effectiveness to influence transformational change. Whether research in sport is aimed at shallow or deeper Leverage Points is unknown. This study aimed to assess highly impactful research in sports science, sports nutrition/metabolism, sports medicine, sport and exercise psychology, sports management, motor control, sports biomechanics and sports policy/law through a Leverage Points lens. The 10 most highly cited original-research manuscripts from each journal representing these fields were analysed for the Leverage Point with which the intervention described in the manuscript was focused. The results indicate that highly impactful research in sports science, sports nutrition/metabolism, sports biomechanics and sports medicine is predominantly focused at the shallow end of the Leverage Points hierarchy. Conversely, the interventions drawn from journals representing sports management and sports policy/law were focused on the deeper end. Other journals analysed had a mixed profile. Explanations for these findings include the dual practitioner/academic needing to “think fast” to solve immediate questions in sports science/medicine/nutrition, limited engagement with “working slow” systems and method experts and differences in incremental vs. non-incremental research strategies

The role of perspective in refereeing: Insights from a video-based decision-making experiment

ABSTRACT Decision accuracy is a crucial factor in the evaluation of refereeing performance. In sports research, officials’ decision-making is frequently assessed outside real games through video-based decision experiments, where they evaluate recorded game situations from a third-person perspective. This study examines whether the inclusion of the first-person perspective influences decision accuracy and certainty. Twenty-four professional officials from the first and second German basketball leagues participated in the study. The officials assessed 50 game situations from both first-person and third-person perspectives, indicating their decisions and certainty levels. The statistical analysis utilises signal detection theory to evaluate the efficacy of the first-person perspective compared to the third-person perspective in identifying rule violations and no-calls in video recordings. The findings indicate that the first-person perspective does not yield superior accuracy in identifying foul calls. However, scenes from the first-person perspective exhibit a significant 9% increase in correctly identifying no-calls. Furthermore, officials report significantly higher levels of decision certainty and comfort when using the first-person perspective. The study suggests that sports officials may benefit from incorporating additional scenes from the first-person perspective into video-based decision training. Future studies should explore whether this additional perspective improves the training effect and translates into enhanced in-game performance.

How Does Increasing Contextual Interference in a Musical Practice Session Affect Acquisition and Retention?

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of three schedules of practice on high-level violinists’ learning. The contextual interference (CI) effect occurs when two or more tasks are practiced in an interleaved manner, which has been shown to impair initial learning but improve retention. How a musician alternates between tasks during practice can have a great impact on learning. This study was designed to explore how an increasing schedule of CI within a practice session would compare to the traditional blocked and random schedules. Sport research has shown a dynamically adaptive schedule to be advantageous, yet this area is relatively unexplored in music. Twenty advanced violinists at a music school practiced three sets of musical excerpts under three practice schedule conditions: blocked (pieces practiced one at a time), increasing contextual interference (blocked and then random), and interleaved (pieces randomly alternating). Recordings were taken at the stages of sight-reading, acquisition (immediately after practice sessions), and retention (24 hours later). Expert ratings of each musician’s recordings revealed no effect at the acquisition stage. However, at the delayed retention test, the blocked condition proved to be most effective. Fifty percent of participants perceived blocked practice to be the most effective.

Recognising, addressing and supporting the challenging nature of community sport coaching work: potential ways forward for research and practice

ABSTRACT This paper critically examines key issues that continue to pervade the domain of community sport coaching. Specifically, we centre attention on a) conceptualisations of policy implementation and enactment, b) neoliberal working conditions and policies and their impact, and c) training and education currently offered to practitioners. For each issue, we map out some of the key concerns in both research and practice and the implications of these for community sport coaching’s ability to achieve its purported objectives. We then present potential future directions for research and practice before outlining, in the final section, specific methodological approaches capable of being deployed to examine and have practical impact for these specific issues in sufficiently complex ways. This article will be of use to community sport organisations, coaches, educators, managers, researchers, and others as they seek to enhance the criticality and interrogative nature of their work.

The increasing of athleticness and the domination of male qualities in women's sports

Abstract. Starting from the moment of the birth of the modern sports movement, where women did not compete, and their participation was widely discussed, and until now, when women's sports are a generally accepted and everyday phenomenon, the place of women in sports has undergone tremendous transformations. In 1900, the participation of women in competitions on the world stage was officially allowed. Gradually, female athletes debunked the myths of the time, and the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics included 45% women and became the most gender-balanced games to date.
 Of course, daily training requires high physical and emotional effort from women. Emotional and physiological changes that occur in women in the process of playing sports are an actual direction of modern research, since the psycho-emotional component is an important component of building the training process. Despite the fact that many specialists are engaged in gender research in sports (Y. Shakhlina, 2006; 2010; Maers A. M., Lips H. M., 1978, C. S. Pawlowski, C. Ergler), psycho-emotional changes still remain an understudied area, which emphasizes the relevance of this work.

Measuring leadership in sport: Development and validation of the Identity Leadership Inventory – Youth (ILI-Y)

The social identity approach to leadership posits that leaders' effectiveness depends on their ability to represent, advance, create, and embed a shared sense of social identity among their followers. Although significant progress has been made in investigating the benefits of identity leadership in adult sports, research in youth sports is still in its infancy. One reason is the lack of a youth-centric inventory that adequately measures identity leadership in this population. To bridge this gap, we developed and validated a long (16 items) and short (5 items) version of the Identity Leadership Inventory for Youth Sport (ILI-Y or ILI-Y-Short-Form) through five studies conducted in three phases of research. Data were primarily collected in football in the United Kingdom, involving a total of 1096 participants. Results of Phase I of this study provided little to no evidence that the ILI – originally developed for adults – was understandable (Study 1) and had factor validity and internal consistency (Study 2) in a sample of youth athletes. Therefore, in Phase II, the ILI was revised, leading to the development of the ILI-Y, which was understandable for youth athletes (Study 3). Results from Phase II (Study 4) also indicated that the ILI-Y exhibited a unidimensional factor structure, which was subsequently confirmed in Phase III (Study 5). This last phase offered additional evidence for the discriminant, criterion, and incremental validity of the ILI-Y and its short form, along with their measurement invariance across genders and age groups, and internal consistency. This study provides sports psychology researchers and practitioners with a valid measure to assess identity leadership in youth sports.

Organisational Culture Research in Competitive Sport – A Systematic Review

Introduction: Defining and measuring organisational culture in the sport sector receives little attention. Nevertheless, it has an impact on the effectiveness and functioning of sport organisations. Objective: The aim of this paper is to explore definitions of sport organisational culture and to present its measurement possibilities through international literature. Methods: The secondary research will review the international literature on competitive sport between 1999 and 2022, using a systematic sampling according to predefined criteria. Results: In addition to general bibliometric data, the results present the frequency of keywords for each definition, the measurement methods used to assess sport culture, and group studies on sport culture according to the literature. Conclusion: We discuss the results of the publications presented in the literature and their conclusions, thus contributing to the Hungarian research on sport culture. Keywords: sport organisational culture, competitive sport, definition, measurement methods, systematic review

Progress in Ski Jumping Technology Based on Biomechanical Sport Research Methods

(1) Background: Previous studies have compared research into ski jumping in different motor processes, but there is a lack of comparative analysis of the biomechanical research methods used to investigate different ski jumping sports. (2) Content: Our study compared the advantages and disadvantages of six research methods and proposes future research directions. Motion video collection and analysis show that controlling angular momentum and achieving stable flight attitude in the take-off process are the most critical factors in ski jumping performance. Most research on force platforms focuses on dynamic performance at the time of take-off, but there are few training sites with an embedded force platform, and so, more empirical research is required. Wearable inertial measurement units, including gyroscopes and accelerometers, can be used to determine a series of forces, calculate the joint angle, and speculate the position of the centroid during motion. Surface EMG studies are primarily used to compare the activity characteristics of the lower limb muscles in the actual field of the jump, the exercise simulation, and the lack of complete training process data. Wind tunnel measurement can satisfy fluid mechanics simulation experiments and provide theoretical support for optimizing special ski jumping technology. Based on the theory of computational fluid dynamics, the optimal drag reduction posture data of ski jumpers can be derived using computer simulations. (3) Conclusions: Due to the wide range of ski jumping sports, the present research focused on the kinematics and dynamics of different movement stages, lacking the study of the complete exercise training process. The range of wearable inertial measurement and sensor equipment can cover the whole process of ski jumping, including kinematics and dynamics data, and is a feasible and reliable test method for monitoring ski jump training in natural environments. The simultaneous testing of surface electromyography, kinematics, and dynamics requires further exploration. (4) Future direction of development: Under computational fluid dynamics, wearable inertial measurement units and global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs), intelligent wind tunnel experimental training areas will become essential tools for ski jumping research.

Analysis of the Current Situation of Chinese Sports Consumption Market and Research on Its Development Countermeasures

The sports consumption market in China has undergone remarkable expansion, driven by the increasing disposable incomes of its population and a growing emphasis on health and fitness. This article delves deeper into the multifaceted evolution of this industry, tracing its journey from its inception to its present state, which is characterized by a dynamic and multifarious landscape. Importantly, this transformation signifies a noteworthy shift in consumer priorities, with a stronger focus on personal well-being and active sports engagement. While the potential for growth within this market is substantial, it is not without its share of challenges. Among these challenges are issues related to inadequate sports infrastructure and less-than-optimal marketing strategies. This study adopts a comprehensive research approach, combining qualitative interviews and quantitative data analysis, to thoroughly investigate these hurdles and propose viable solutions that can facilitate sustainable growth. By contextualizing the historical development of the sports consumption market in China and analyzing the ongoing shifts, this study equips industry stakeholders with invaluable insights. These insights empower stakeholders to make informed decisions regarding the future trajectory of the market. As the sports consumption landscape continues to evolve in response to changing consumer behaviors and market dynamics, this research serves as a vital resource for navigating this complex terrain, ultimately fostering the continued development and expansion of the industry. In essence, it offers a roadmap for realizing the full potential of the Chinese sports consumption market while addressing its inherent challenges.

Social Media and Sport Research: Empirical Examinations Showcasing Diversity in Methods and Topics

This commentary introduces the second of two special issues in the International Journal of Sport Communication centered on social media and sport. The empirical studies presented in this issue illustrate both the diversity of topics and methodological approaches utilized by researchers working at the intersection of social media and sport. Research articles in this issue analyze topics ranging from sport consumer behavior to online fan communities to coaches’ perceptions of activism-related content posted on team social media accounts. The research presented here also employs a variety of methodological approaches including experimental design, critical discourse analysis, rhetorical analysis, and applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Collectively, these studies offer a foundation on which future research in social media and sport can build to continue to enhance our understanding of social media’s impact on the sport world.

Engineering Features from Raw Sensor Data to Analyse Player Movements during Competition.

Research in field sports often involves analysis of running performance profiles of players during competitive games with individual, per-position, and time-related descriptive statistics. Data are acquired through wearable technologies, which generally capture simple data points, which in the case of many team-based sports are times, latitudes, and longitudes. While the data capture is simple and in relatively high volumes, the raw data are unsuited to any form of analysis or machine learning functions. The main goal of this research is to develop a multistep feature engineering framework that delivers the transformation of sequential data into feature sets more suited to machine learning applications.

Meaning in elite sport – A narrative review of scholarship in sport psychology

Introduction Athletes’ heart-felt stories about their experiences in elite sport almost naturally evoke the notion of meaning. However, although various scholars and practitioners have suggested the concept of meaning to the sport psychology audience in the past two decades (e.g., Beckmann, 2023; Ravizza, 2002; Ronkainen & Nesti, 2020), its study in this discipline is still in the early stages compared to established psychological scholarship on the topic. To promote meaning as a complementary lens for research and applied work in sport psychology, the presentation aims to introduce the concept informed by psychological inquiry, and to synthesize and critically comment on the extant scholarship. For this, the wider meaning in life literature will be drawn on to give an overview of components, sources, pathways, and qualities of meaning and set it apart from the related concept of purpose. Methods A narrative review of 15 studies on meaning (n = 10) and purpose (n = 5) from elite sport contexts was conducted. Results The scholarship on meaning and purpose in elite sport revealed itself diverse in terms of employed study designs (quantitative, qualitative), methodologies and theoretical frameworks (e.g., narrative inquiry, phenomenology), conceptualizations of meaning and purpose (e.g., existential meaning, purpose in coaching), interpretations of meaning (intrapsychic or relational), and topics researched in relation to it (e.g., forced migration, injury experiences). To date the literature base on meaning and purpose in elite sport is characterized by fragmentation and largely imprecise use of the concept. Discussion/Conclusion To assist future empirical research and increase conceptual clarity of meaning in elite sport, sport psychology should integrate knowledge from its parent discipline psychology. Additionally, to make the somewhat abstract notion of meaning tangible for sport practitioners, more applied questions must be addressed. Through this, meaning could offer a truly holistic approach to well-being and mental health research and practice in sport. Importantly, “working” with meaning requires personal positioning, since conceiving of meaning as performance enhancement tool or as existential concern has major implications for how it is investigated and for how or whether it should be increased.

Practicing acroyoga in the space of possibilities: Complexity profile as a heuristic device in sport and exercise research

ABSTRACT This article explores the application of complexity science in sports and exercise research, introducing Ashby’s law of requisite variety, Boisot’s and McKelvey’s law of requisite complexity, and Bar-Yam’s complexity profile. These frameworks emphasize the role of complexity in system functionality and shed light on the delicate balance between complexity and scale. Utilising acroyoga as a novel research context, an interpretivist study was conducted to delve into the activity’s complexity profile, revealing the intricate interplay between fostering creativity and maintaining essential regulations. Examining acroyoga practitioners’ and influencers’ perspectives through the complexity profile underscores the sport’s complexity over scale, offering diverse physical, cognitive, affective, and social benefits. However, the limited emphasis on scaling might confine acroyoga to the fringes, hindering widespread acceptance. This study demonstrates the complexity profile as a heuristic tool, challenging assumptions and encouraging innovative perspectives. Acroyoga serves as a compelling case study, highlighting the complexity-scale balance and paving the way for further exploration and sports-related policy formulation.

Strike 3 … Out! Investigating Pre-Game Moods, Performance, and Mental Health of Softball Umpires.

Mood research in sports typically focuses on athletes, with sports officials being largely overlooked. In the current study, mood profiling was used to determine if softball umpires reported an identifiable and consistent mood profile and if mood was predictive of umpiring performance and/or reflective of positive mental health. Eleven male and five female participants aged 25-68 years (M = 48.5 ± 15.5 years) each completed the Brunel Mood Scale on multiple occasions prior to officiating games at the 2020 U18 National Softball Championships. A total of 185 mood profiles were analysed. Performance was assessed using Softball Australia's official umpire assessment tool. Overall, participants reported an iceberg mood profile, which tends to be associated with positive mental health and good performance. Umpiring performances (pass/fail) were correctly classified in 75.0% of cases from tension, depression, and confusion scores (p = 0.003). Participant sex explained 25.7% of the variance in mood scores (p < 0.001); age, 25.8% of the variance (p < 0.001); position on the diamond, 10.5% of the variance (p = 0.003); and accreditation level, 14.3% of the variance (p < 0.001). Australian softball umpires typically reported mood profiles associated with positive mental health, and none reported profiles associated with risk of mental ill-health.

Listen, Tell, Show: Recreation and the Black and Decolonial Storytelling in Sport and Physical Culture Research

Stories are always grounded in personal, collective, and ancestral experiences and come in a variety of visual, performance, textile, and text-based forms. Physical culture participation and politics can be better understood by engaging with the stories of people facing ongoing colonial and epistemic injustices, intersectional oppressions, as well as structural and cultural racism. In contrast to dominant trends in the cultural politics of sport, this article offers an ontological, epistemological, and methodological alternative. Following Black and decolonial scholars, we must honor non-Western storytelling modalities to listen to, tell, show, and center many experiences to resist Western colonial culture's binary structures and hierarchies, introduce alternate theorizations, and inject other ways of knowing and being into the sport and physical cultures and into physical cultural studies. This article highlights several areas of Black and decolonial studies that will be essential to efforts at transformative justice in sport and sports scholarship: interdisciplinarity, the bios–mythoi relationship, counter-storytelling, and creation stories.

A qualitative analysis of Swedish sport psychology practitioners' experience of a continued professional development program.

Although sport psychology practitioners and researchers acknowledge the importance of continued professional development (CPD) for professional effectiveness and excellence, few studies have explored the influence of CPD activities on the practitioners' practice and thinking. This study examined qualified Swedish sport psychology practitioners' experiences of engaging in a CPD program and how it impacted their professional development. The Swedish Sports Confederation offers a CPD program that targets performance enhancement services and psychotherapy for sport psychology practitioners. We explored the influence of this CPD program on the professional development of 13 graduates (five females; age in years: M = 41.2, SD = 8.3) via semi-structured interviews. Our stance involved a realist ontology and constructionist epistemology. We followed the six-step Reflexive Thematic Analysis procedures to analyze data. We identified four themes of CPD: (1) Critique (participants decided to do the CPD program because of perceived gaps in their knowledge and skills), (2) Change (participants discussed several changes as a result of the CPD program), (3) Context (participants discussed the aspects of the CPD program that promoted change), and (4) Challenge (participants mentioned issues related to having completed the program). The study provides insights into the value of CPD activities for sport psychology practitioners, advances current knowledge on practitioner maturation, and illustrates how CPD fits within a practitioner's lifelong learning. Future research could investigate the professional development of mid-career sport psychology practitioners engaging in other CPD programs to confirm or extend this work.

Providing a framework and guidelines for sport organizations to understand and predict sport consumer behavior

PurposeThe purpose of this commentary is to discuss a framework (the Revised Model of Sport Consumer Behavior – R-MSCB; Trail, 2019) to accomplish the following objectives. (1) Provide a framework for sport marketers and sport organizations to use in their own market research. (2) Designate the processes needed to generate results and knowledge that sport organizations, sport marketers and associated corporate partners can use to improve marketing campaigns. (3) Provide suggestions for analytic techniques and measurement constructs/instruments that will facilitate market research within the sport industry.Design/methodology/approachThe author created a 140-item questionnaire for the pre-survey and a 50-item questionnaire for the post-survey. The pre-survey was given at the beginning of the season, and the post-survey was given at the end of the season. The research group has generated a sequence of 13 studies and has collected pre-survey responses from over 7,800 people across 4 continents, 8 sports and 13 teams (data collections), with more teams still planned and over 2,000 post-season survey responses with data collection continuing.FindingsThis project, with its 13 studies, will provide sport organizations with the theories/frameworks, knowledge and processes to do their own market research in a more effective and efficient manner and will show sport organizations how to understand the complexities of sport consumer behavior, the motivations behind it and how it varies extensively across individuals. The author will show sports organizations how to collect data from their consumers using valid and reliable measures and constructs that will allow them to segment their consumers, how to effectively market to those segments and how to establish long-lasting relationships that make a satisfied and loyal customer.Originality/valueThis paper provides the framework and guidelines so that sport marketers and researchers can identify specific variables, constructs and relationships that will further their own objectives when attempting to explain sport consumer behavior. Using their own market research, they can implement the results/output in association with the Communications Strategy Model to create more effective and efficient marketing and communications campaigns and consequently drive key performance indicators (KPIs) and improve revenue streams.

Hermann Schmitz and the ”New Phenomenology of sports”. A programmatic outline

ABSTRACT Phenomenology has long been one of the basic theoretical and methodological approaches in sports philosophy. Among the many varieties of philosophical phenomenology, phenomenological sports research mainly uses the approaches of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Another phenomenological author who has so far remained almost completely unknown to international sports philosophy is German philosopher Hermann Schmitz (1928–2021). Schmitz named his phenomenological approach “New Phenomenology” since he had broken with some basic assumptions of ‘old’ phenomenology (e.g. neither construing his phenomenology as a philosophy of consciousness nor conducting a view of the essence) and also discovered new areas of phenomena (e.g. felt body, atmospheres, expansive and directional space). Moreover, Schmitz considered his New Phenomenology to be an empirically oriented science. This article aims to introduce Schmitz’s approach into the international discussion on sports philosophy. In particular, it is shown how New Phenomenology is an enrichment for phenomenological sports research. To that end, the article outlines the basic idea and central components of New Phenomenology. The main focus rests on four concepts, whose analytical potential is illustrated using selected sports phenomena: felt-bodily experiences, (transhuman) felt-bodily communication, private and common atmospheres, as well as situations as an ontological concept and empirical phenomenon. This provides an outline of the program for a “New Phenomenology of sports”. The article advocates for its further elaboration and to that end offers theoretical, methodological and empirical suggestions.