Mixing Quantitative and Qualitative Methods in Scientific Research in Sports

A fourteen-page review paper in Sporticopedia – SMB, the proceedings journal of a sports conference run by the Faculty of Sport at Union – Nikola Tesla University in Belgrade. Its case is methodological pluralism: sports research should combine numbers with interviews and observation, because each kind of method sees what the other misses.

It sets the two traditions side by side in a table taken from Liu (2022), constructivism against (post-)positivism, and then surveys the philosophy behind combining them. Pragmatism is the usual foundation for mixed methods, valuing whatever is useful. The paper favours realism, following Allmark and Machaczek (2018), which holds that research should uncover the mechanisms that produce what we observe, and cites Ryba and colleagues (2020) for the view that critical realism makes the two kinds of method compatible. Its main worked example is hypothetical: wearables in athlete training, where the measurements show what changed and interviews explain why and how, perhaps revealing over-reliance on the devices or stress from constant monitoring. It also lists the usual methods on each side, describes the Delphi method for reaching expert consensus, and closes on fan research.

Read in full, it is thinner than its abstract suggests. It reports no data of its own, and its “case study analysis” is a set of imagined studies (“Consider a study…”). The section on qualitative research opens with a paragraph that is the abstract of Gilad’s 2019 paper on public administration reproduced almost word for word, first-person “I propose” included, with the citation only at its end. A paragraph on knowledge management in high-tech firms and a chart of survey use in the market-research industry sit in a paper about sport and are never tied back to it. Of its 21 references, nine are by one or both authors. The movement-sciences source cited in the text as Camerino, Castañer and Anguera (2023) appears in the reference list as their 2012 edited book. The table and the realism argument are sound, and both belong to the authors the paper cites.