The science and politics of ‘knowledge’ in safe sport research

Abstract

Research in the domain of safe sport frequently focuses on prevalence studies that have been historically dissimilar in methodology. Attempting to unify future studies for comparable results, Parent et al. (2018) introduced and validated the Violence Towards Athletes Questionnaire (VTAQ). The epistemological critiques of what knowledge this, or any, research tool generates about the sensitive topic of violence in sport has not been fully investigated. Additionally, how this ‘knowledge’ is used and by whom leads to further reconsideration about the validity of the data the VTAQ generates. Lastly, a brief discourse review illustrates how athletes’ capital may be appropriated to reinforce claims of validity and exclusivity of knowledge.

The Question Appraisal System (QAS; Schaad, Jans & Scott, 2020) was used to review the VTAQ. Ethnographic research was conducted at safe sport conferences along with follow-up interviews with researchers and practitioners. These data were juxtaposed, along with a brief literature review, to better understand how the quantitative tool is conceived and used qualitatively by situated researchers.

Analysis of the VTAQ highlighted myriads of elementary design flaws (e.g., more than 80% of the items were ‘double-barrelled’), most of which would tend towards over-reporting cases of violence. The qualitative data illustrated the political, activist motivations of prominent researchers in the field, and their professional dependency on high prevalence rates to justify funding for their research projects. Interviews also revealed the heterogeneity of athletes’ experiences and relationships to violence in sport, despite frequent use in the literature of the singular ‘the athlete voice’.

As a reliable generator of knowledge, the VTAQ is arguably still in the development stage, and is not ready to be the standard-bearer of safe sport research. Researchers responsible for its creation are publicly open about their political motivations to use high prevalence rates to change policymakers’ decisions and to receive funding for future research. There is a significant overlap between what they consider scientific research and what ‘knowledge’ they need to promote their political aims as social activists. The scientific curiosity of their research is reasonably then called into question, when it is conducted with an objective of achieving a certain result. Furthermore, by presenting their research as ‘validated’ and representative of ‘the athlete voice’, they lean on the appropriation of scientific and sporting capital to valorise otherwise questionable data. Athletes are not a homogenous group, and have voices that vary, even sometimes in support of violence. Research that presents ‘the athlete voice’ as uniform support of the political aims of these researchers is better seen as a product of activism rather than science.

References

Parent, S., Fortier, K., Vaillancourt-Morel, M.-P., Lessard, G., Goulet, C., Demers, G., Paradis, H., & Hartill, M. (2019). Development and initial factor validation of the Violence Toward Athletes Questionnaire (VTAQ) in a sample of young athletes. Society and Leisure, 42(3), 471–486. https://doi.org/10.1080/07053436.2019.1682262

Schaad, A., Jans, M., & Scott, M. (2020). Improving the Question Appraisal System (QAS): Moving further away from black magic and black boxes. American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) 2020.