Audit protocol for evaluating diversity in sport performance footwear research: Assessing footwear design, participant representation, and author demographics in published studies

Abstract

Equity, diversity and inclusiveness have been identified as areas for improvement across sports and biomechanics research. To identify and prioritise areas for improvement, it is important to understand the current ‘state of play’. This protocol outlines an audit process designed to (1) characterise and compare demographic data of both participants and researchers in published performance shoe research and (2) profile considerations of equity, diversity and inclusiveness in performance shoe design. A comprehensive multi-language, search strategy will be conducted across 4 primarily English and 1 Chinese data base. Sport specific journals published in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, Spanish and Portuguese will be hand-searched. All studies, published since 2015, investigating the design or testing of a shoe, insert or orthotic required or facilitating for sports performance will be considered for inclusion. For the purposes of this audit, sports will be limited to those recognised by the International Olympic Committee Summer Olympic International Federations. Footwear company websites will be searched for details on specific performance footwear. Studies will be grouped based on the sports the shoe is designed for. Participants’ gender and/or sex, race and ethnicity will be directly extracted from included studies or by contacting the authors. Researchers’ gender and/or sex, position within the authorship group and location where the study was conducted will be extracted from included studies or obtained through university profiles, professional pages or by directly contacting authors. Differences in demographic data will be compared between shoe type and representativeness of participants, researchers and footwear will be calculated using participation to prevalence ratios. The proposed protocol represents a committed step towards improving equity, diversity and inclusiveness throughout footwear science.