Search results for "sport science"
showing 10 items of 1573 documents
Supporters’ attitudes towards European football governance: structural dimensions and sociodemographic patterns
2020
The role of fans in football governance is a topic of increasing academic and political interest. This article offers a quantitative approach to investigate supporters’ opinions of governance structures in European football. It asks whether fans trust governing bodies, clubs, leagues and other stakeholders currently in charge of football governance. It also investigates the extent to which fans consider they should have a direct say on how football clubs are governed. Drawing on concepts from sports governance literature, an online survey collects opinions of football fans in six European countries (United Kingdom, Spain, Turkey, Poland, France, and Germany). The results indicate a high lev…
‘Don’t ever mix God with sports’: Christian religion in athletes’ stories of life transitions
2019
Sport psychology researchers have increasingly recognized the need to adopt a holistic perspective when seeking to understand athletes’ adaptation to life transitions. The present study sought to understand how religion influences athletes’ journeys in sport and experiences of life transitions. Two Christian elite athletes participated in life story interviews which we analyzed via narrative analysis. Although the participants narratively separated religious belief from sport, religion, as a source of basic world assumptions and values, provided a broader framework of meaning and continuity in their sport lives. Yet, both stories involved a growing distance to institutional religious practi…
Identity tensions in dual career : the discursive construction of future selves by female Finnish judo athletes
2019
To date, few studies have explored how changes in the practices, policies, and politics of sport and education may be implicated in how young athletes think about and plan for the future. Drawing on cultural praxis and feminist poststructuralist frameworks, this paper explores whether and how dual career (DC) policies and practices in Finland guide female judo athletes’ imaginings about their future. Discourse analysis was used to analyse interviews with three adolescent (aged 16) and three young adult (aged 20, 23, and 27) elite female judo athletes. Differences were found in the ways the athletes in the different age groups constructed their future athletic, civic and gendered selves. We …
Composite vignettes of Swedish male and female professional handball players’ career paths
2019
The aim of this study was to describe gender-specific career paths of Swedish professional handball players. A reanalysis of Ekengren et al. (2018) career interviews with nine male and nine female players led to creating two composite vignettes using the athletes’ own words, accounted for typical features in the male and female players’ career paths. Seven themes were identified in the analysis of the men’s transcripts and eight themes derived from the women’s transcripts. Further, the themes of both vignettes were aligned with career stages described in our previous study (Ekengren et al. 2018). The male players’ vignette is interpreted as a performance narrative congruent with elite handb…
‘Glocal’ processes in peripheral football countries:A figurational sociological comparison of Finland and Hungary
2015
The aim of this article is to increase the understanding of the global and local contexts in football by finding out what social, cultural and economic dimensions seem to characterize ‘periphery’ football. This study applies figurational sociological perspective, which is applicable to the research on globalization processes and sport. The sources utilized are publications on the history and sociology of football as well as interviews with football practitioners. First, a theoretical framework of the global football figuration is advanced. Second, applying the constructed framework, the concept of periphery football country is discussed. It was found in accordance with previous research tha…
Applying importance-performance analysis to residents’ perceptions of large sporting events
2019
The objective of this study was to apply an importance-performance analysis to analyze residents’ perceptions of a large sporting event. Initially, a confirmatory factorial analysis was conducted t...
Global and local interactions in football : the changing field of professional football stadiums in Finland and Hungary in the 2000s
2018
This article aims to increase understanding of the global-local contexts in football by exploring the changing field of professional football stadiums in Finland and Hungary in the 2000s. More specifically, the cases of two clubs, HJK (Finland) and Ferencvárosi TC (Hungary) are studied. We employ concepts of sport and globalization. The research data consist of semi-structured expert interviews with Finnish and Hungarian football practitioners, media and club documents, and data from observation. The results suggest that interactions of global and local forces are reflected in the development and operation of stadiums. On the one hand, international and national governing bodies have streng…
Getting a Grip on the Private Sport Sector in Europe
2017
Contemporary sport is organized and developed around public, voluntary and private sectors. Especially public and voluntary sport sectors have been approached in recent publications in Europe, where sport has traditionally been formed around state involvement and non-profit sport clubs. Private sport sector has received less attention in research because the field is multidimensional, fragment and difficult to define. Private sport sector comprises all profit making, commercial companies and other organisations and events that produce and sell sport goods and services with the aim of making monetary profit. The demand for sport-related products and services has been growing for many years. …
Trends in Medically Attended Injuries in Czech Adolescents.
2017
Objective: Due to the importance of surveillance of injuries and accidents in the Czech Republic, the purpose. of this study was to report the temporal trends of injuries of Czech adolescents between 2002 and 2014. Methods: Adolescents (N = 20,038) from the Czech Republic, that took part in the 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2014 HBSC study, reported the frequency of medically attended injuries in the past 12 months. Repeated binary logistic regressions with different years as reference categories were performed. Results: Less than half (44.7%) of all Czech adolescents reported they had experienced at least one medically attended injuries in the past 12 months, with boys experiencing more injuries th…
Teachers as frontline agents of integration: Finnish physical education students’ reflections on intercultural encounters
2018
Background and purpose: This article focuses on how future Physical Education and Dance teachers may be better prepared to work in increasingly diverse education environments. It also discusses how tertiary institutions might address issues of social inclusion and cultural pluralism within their programmes, courses and assignments. The authors critically reflect on an experiential learning intervention in Jyväskylä, Finland, in which trainee PE teachers facilitated kinaesthetic language-learning workshops for asylum seekers. The applied use of physical education and dance in this context was aimed at providing a distinct opportunity to consider a PE teacher’s professional competence and rol…