Validity in context – qualitative research issues in sport and exercise studies: a response to John Smith

Abstract

10.1080/19398440902908951 Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise 939441 (print)/193 -845X (online) Origin l Article 2 0 Taylor & Francis 0 0002009 RobertBrus d B .Brustad@unco.edu Sport is an entirely human endeavour. Our involvement in sport and physical activity is full of personally and socially generated meanings as our participation occurs in interaction with other individuals in various social and cultural contexts. Qualitative researchers in sport and physical activity have an essential role in uncovering the meaningful nature of this involvement. Without this contribution, we will never have a good understanding for why completing a marathon could transform a person’s life or how burnout is experienced by adolescent or elite athletes. Neither could we understand the idiosyncratic and contextual factors that influence the practice of physical activity for depressed individuals (Faulkner and Biddle 2004). In order to improve the sport and physical activity experience for individuals, we need to better understand the lived meaning of the experience and qualitative/interpretive forms of research provide us with important tools for achieving this goal. As John Smith (2009) has emphasised, how we judge research quality depends greatly on who we are and what we wish to become. I focus on the personal and social meanings associated with sport involvement at the outset of this paper because these meanings generally form the subject matter of qualitative inquiry in the sport domain and reflect who we are as researchers. Our subject matter is comprised of those very human processes and experiences that are reflected in thoughts, emotions and purposeful behaviours and which are shaped by the dynamic flux of social life. Although great attention is devoted to dissecting and critiquing the methodology of qualitative researchers, particularly in terms of the validity issue, a larger issue is that our subject matter, the types of research questions that we ask, and our research purposes are markedly different than those of the quantitative researcher. Therefore, it is not possible to focus only on validity concerns as a methodological issue while ignoring epistemological considerations (Krane et al. 1997, Culver et al. 2003). In sport and exercise studies, neither the subject matter nor the methodology of qualitative researchers has been highly regarded nor understood and the corresponding lack of understanding and appreciation has affected the types of questions we have asked and limited the knowledge that we have gained. As Smith (2009) has noted in this volume of Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise, the traditional scientific enterprise has been developed to protect our ‘objective selves’ from our ‘subjective selves’. Historically, intransigent methodological