Qualitative methods in sport: a concise overview for guiding social scientific sport research

This paper offers a concise overview of qualitative methods in sport and the social sciences. A broad definition of qualitative research is first offered, after which various qualitative traditions – ethnography, grounded theory, narrative inquiry and critical inquiry – are described. After describing these traditions, the paper highlights several ways in which social scientific sport researchers might collect data for their investigations. These are interviewing, participant observation, visual methods and the Internet. Next, the paper describes a type of analysis that qualitative sport researchers might use to make sense of the data they collect. Finally, generalizability and validity are discussed in relation to qualitative sport research in the social sciences.