This article is based on the 2022 Earle F. Zeigler Lecture Award that I presented in Atlanta, Georgia. For this paper, I reflect upon my career as a qualitative sport management researcher, with a specific focus on the mistakes I have made. I have two objectives with this paper. One objective is to advocate for continued learning about and rethinking how we conduct qualitative research. The second objective is to highlight ways in which we, as a field, can improve our qualitative research literacy. In the paper, I discuss eight learnings on the topics of ontologies and epistemologies, research designs, themes, pseudonyms, rigor, generalizability, positionality, and the publisher SAGE. In learning from my mistakes, we can be better consumers, producers, and evaluators of qualitative research.
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Larena Hoeber
Zachary W. Arth, James R. Angelini, Patrick C. Gentile, and Andrew W. Hard
This case study assessed the differences in time on camera dedicated to men and women athletes at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. An analysis of the entirety of the programming on the the American broadcast television company NBC, including the prime-time broadcasts, the daytime programming, and the additional nightly content, yielded nearly 185 hr of coded Olympic content. When excluding mixed-sex events, in the 61.5 hr of prime-time coverage, women received 60.05% of the time on camera. During the non-prime-time coverage, which spanned 123 hr, men received the majority of clock time, accounting for 51.6% of coverage. In addition, differences by sport were uncovered, with the major differences occurring in alpine skiing, which saw more women’s coverage regardless of broadcast. In contrast, women received more coverage in freestyle skiing and snowboarding during the prime-time broadcast, but men were more emphasized in these competitions during the non-prime-time content. Utilizing agenda setting as the theoretical framework for this case study, ramifications for these broadcast trends and differences are discussed.
Jesper Karlsson, Åsa Bäckström, Magnus Kilger, and Karin Redelius
In contemporary society, visual information is influential, not least when businesses are communicating with potential customers. It represents and influences how people understand phenomena. In sports, much attention is directed toward how media represent elite sports and sport stars. Less attention is directed toward children’s sports. The aim of this article is to explore and analyze visual representations of children on sport businesses’ websites. The sample contained 697 images of sporting children, on which an interpretative content and discourse analysis was conducted. The study shows that the ideal customer emerging on these sites is a White, physically active, able, and slim boy or girl. Consumer culture seems to reproduce and preserve existing normative frameworks rather than producing alternative norms and ideas in children’s sport. Moreover, dilemmatic images of children both as competent and as innocent develop, displaying a childhood that should be both joyful and active but also safeguarded.
Vanessa Ratten
Social media is endemic to the sport industry and ensures its global competitiveness. The aim of this article is to critique social media scholarship in sport studies by taking a sport entrepreneurship perspective. This approach is useful in expanding and building on the existing social media research by focusing on the innovation apparent in the sport industry. An overview of current literature on social media and sport entrepreneurship is discussed. This article concludes with a number of different research trajectories that are needed to advance the practice and scholarship of sport social media studies and sport entrepreneurship.
Iris A. Lesser, Stéphanie Turgeon, Carl P. Nienhuis, and Corliss Bean
Postpartum physical activity can positively impact mental and physical health. There is a need to better understand how physical activity is related to various psychological constructs to support physical activity in postpartum women. Thus, the purpose of this exploratory, quantitative, study was to examine differences between postpartum women who were physically active and those who were physically inactive on psychological (e.g., self-compassion) and mental health constructs. Five hundred twenty-five women (M age = 28.4) completed an online survey. Participants who reported being active following the birth of their last child had significantly higher exercise self-efficacy, self-compassion, and basic psychological needs fulfillment for exercise and significantly lower levels of perceived fatigue, anxiety, and depression compared with their inactive counterparts. However, active mothers had lower body satisfaction than inactive mothers. Women who are active after the birth of a child have improved psychological constructs that may benefit overall well-being and mental health during this challenging transition.
Chris Corr, Richard M. Southall, Crystal Southall, and Richard J. Hart
Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) football games are presented in a hypercommercialized manner by television broadcast networks through the targeted use of in-game graphics and corporatized content. While commercialized FBS football broadcast components have been analyzed within the frameworks of a hypercommercialized National Collegiate Athletic Association and media institutional logics, an analysis of commentator language has yet to be examined within the larger institutional field of FBS football broadcasts. Utilizing agenda setting and media framing as frameworks, this case study examined the manner in which commentators frame FBS football players as professionals in a hypercommercialized institutional setting. From a sample of 18 FBS bowl games during the 2019–20 season, discourse and thematic analysis reveal that commentators frame FBS football players in the context of their future professional opportunities (i.e., National Football League). The framing of FBS football players as professionals aligns with extant literature examining the broader institutional field of broadcast media and logics pervasive in the National Collegiate Athletic Association as an organization. The commodification of FBS football players as integral components to strategic programmatic content promoting future broadcast programming is discussed.
Julie McCleery, Irina Tereschenko, Longxi Li, and Nicholas Copeland
In the youth sports domain, few coaches are women, masculine ideologies permeate the culture, and coaching practices do not always align with behaviors supportive of positive youth sports experience. The purpose of this study was to examine differences in men’s and women’s coaching behaviors associated with creating positive youth sports experience, including behaviors that create a safe and fun participation environment, a mastery motivational climate, and autonomy-supportive coaching. A total of 219 youth and high school coaches across different sports in one county in a western state responded to the survey—29% of them women. Along with the overall dearth of women in coaching, we found differences between men and women in the types of coaching positions they hold and the behaviors they bring to their coaching. Female coaches were more likely to be paid, primarily part-time, and they were also less likely to have children. Using a multivariate analysis of variance, significant mean vectors were found between female and male coaches in the four coaching behaviors measured. Women’s ratings were significantly higher on individual measures for autonomy and safety. As the coaching field comes to better understand the approaches that lead to positive youth sports experience, these findings raise important questions about why women and mothers are not a larger proportion of the coaching landscape and how that might change.
