What is sports research? Well, as the name implies, sports research is research that is focused on sports only.

By this, I am not referring to sports research products from sportsresearch.com. I am talking about the actual academic research centred on collecting data and actively engaging with the data collected to reach a feasible conclusion.

Carrying out sports-based research can be somewhat challenging, knowing that one has to do thorough findings and surveys on a specific sport that the researcher is interested in. Oh yes, you cannot carry out this kind of research on all the available sports in the world; rather, the researcher will have to select a particular sport that the research will concentrate on and do an elaborate study on.

So, the researcher could decide to choose football, basketball, volleyball, cricket, swimming, snooker, golf or any other type of sport that he or she is very much interested in at the time of the research.

How to do sports research?

The first step to carrying out this type of research is to craft a topic for example “Identifying the scoring patterns in football”, “the role of a referee in a football tournament”, and “Evaluation of the effect of red cards on a player”. This is just an example, better researchable topic could be crafted and presented to the supervisor for approval.

Then, decide on what the problem associated with sports is.

The next step will be to list the purpose of the study and its objectives.

Kick-start a thorough literature review on sports, that is the type of sport you intended to carry out research on.

From your literature review, the problem can be sharpened while the methodology is designed followed by data collection and analysis.

Then the final lap of the exercise, which is explaining the findings and concluding the research.

For purposes of comfortably getting good research material, academic journals such as the Journal of Sports Research and the like are in existence.

Who can carry out the research?

The following persons can carry out sports-based research

Sports lovers and fans

Sports enthusiast

Sports students

How to organize the research

Organizing this type of research in academic parlance is as simple as any other type of research in a higher institution.

The following are formats for writing the research

Introduction to the research

Statement of the research problem

Research purpose and objectives

Hypotheses of each formulated objective

Scope of the research

Definition of operational terms in the field of sport

Significance of the study

Study limitation

Literature review (to be categorized into conceptual, empirical and theoretical reviews)

Research Methodology

Data collection and analysis or interpretation

Summary of findings, conclusion of the research and recommendations from the findings

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