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Validity in context - qualitative research issues in sport and

exercise studies: A response to John Smith

Article  in  Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise · July 2009

DOI: 10.1080/19398440902908951

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Validity in context – qualitative

research issues in sport and exercise
studies: a response to John Smith
a
Robert J. Brustad
a
School of Sport and Exercise Science, University of Northern
Colorado, Greeley, USA

Available online: 26 May 2009

To cite this article: Robert J. Brustad (2009): Validity in context – qualitative research issues in
sport and exercise studies: a response to John Smith, Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise,
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 Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise
Vol. 1, No. 2, July 2009, 112–115

Validity in context – qualitative research issues in sport and exercise

studies: a response to John Smith
Robert J. Brustad*

School of Sport and Exercise Science, University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, USA
(Received 27 February 2009; final version received 5 March 2009)
Taylor and Francis
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Sport is an entirely human endeavour. Our involvement in sport and physical activity
Qualitative
10.1080/19398440902908951
1939-8441
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(online)
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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 under-
stand 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 qualita-
tive 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 ‘objec-
tive selves’ from our ‘subjective selves’. Historically, intransigent methodological

*Email: Bob.Brustad@unco.edu

ISSN 1939-8441 print/ISSN 1939-845X online

© 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/19398440902908951
http://www.informaworld.com
 Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise 113

criteria have been developed in order to maintain this false dichotomy. This dichot-
omy is more difficult to maintain, however, when our subject matter is itself personal
and ‘subjective’. Consider the following sport and exercise science example:

While working together in an exercise physiology lab, two traditionally trained research-
ers developed a mutual attraction that only strengthened with time. Eventually, biologi-
cal urges overwhelmed them and they consummated a new type of relationship.
Subsequently, one of the physiologists was tempted to reflect favourably on the quality
of his personal experience. However, given his intense and professed distrust for subjec-
tive processes he quickly sought a more trustworthy and ‘objective’ source of knowl-
edge. Thus, the scientist asked his counterpart, ‘How was it for me?’

Concerns for the validity of knowledge must be a concern for all researchers and
should be no more or no less important within the interpretive/qualitative paradigm
than it is within the deductive/quantitative paradigm. Within qualitative research, the
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validity issue is always front and centre because we recognise that validity is more
strongly related to the researcher’s role than to specific rules and processes. Validity
cannot be established through reference to some universal criteria or process but can
only be supported by a transparent description of the researcher’s involvement in the
process. As Smith (2009) has noted, however, historically ‘method was the reference
point for judgments about research quality’. In this regard, an ‘airtight’ methodology
has generally been considered to be a necessary, if not entirely sufficient, condition
upon which to make judgements about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ research. This trust in ‘truth
through method’ has also crept into qualitative research and, in many respects, repre-
sents ‘the wolf in sheep’s clothing’ (Culver et al. 2003, p. 7) because the implication
is that qualitative researchers can follow the same procedures as quantitative research-
ers in addressing validity concerns.
Qualitative researchers have tended to respond to, or circumvent validity concerns
by scurrying to use similar or parallel processes for demonstrating validity as those
used by their quantitative colleagues. Others have developed new categories and
terminology (‘trustworthiness’, ‘resonance’, ‘authenticity’) that have extended valid-
ity criteria beyond its traditional boundaries. These efforts have attempted to quell
concerns about ‘methodological anarchy’ in qualitative research (Whittemore et al.
2001) and to provide us with the same types of reasonable means for distinguishing
‘good’ from ‘bad’ research. But, the inherent danger lies in the same idea that we can
find truth through method.
I am not so convinced that the ‘truth through method’ ideology is actually fully
supported in the publication process anyway. The most useful revelation that I gained
from three years of work as the editor of the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology
pertained to how the so-called ‘gatekeepers’ of knowledge (reviewers, associate
editors and editors) arrived at judgements about ‘good’ and ‘not-so-good’ research
during the manuscript review process. I was surprised to see how frequently studies
with ‘airtight’ methodologies were placed in the ‘not-so-good’ research category as a
consequence of what the reviewers regarded as an uninspired, uninteresting, or
uninsightful research question. It seems to me that, for many researchers, concern for
methodology serves as a psychological ‘safety net’ that provides a false sense of secu-
rity that can lead to dull research questions. Who we are as researchers revolves
around the questions that we ask.
Within sport and exercise studies, various influences have shaped how we have
evolved in terms of our scholarship and why qualitative approaches have been later to
 114 R.J. Brustad

surface. As with most emerging fields of studies, the desire to gain credibility and
legitimacy has resulted in the adoption of traditional research approaches. Our
knowledge base in all of the social sciences has suffered, to some extent, from an over-
zealous desire to replicate the natural science research tradition although we do so
with an entirely different subject matter. As Smith (2009) has commented, our prede-
cessors put us on the wrong path. The history of research in psychology during the
past century, for example, is replete with instances of studies involving laboratory rats
in closed and contrived settings because this approach was considered to be the only
legitimate ‘scientific’ way to understand human behaviour. In sport and exercise stud-
ies, our tradition has been very similar. Innumerable studies have been conducted in
an attempt to understand affective response to exercise within artificial laboratory
environments in which mode, intensity and duration characteristics were predeter-
mined by the researcher. How knowledge gained from such contrived and artificial
settings might relate to real-world exercise experiences that could include working out
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with a partner, goal-directed training, barking dogs or chirping birds is beyond my

comprehension. A relatively small proportion of research on exercise and affect has
been conducted in naturally occurring contexts that could actually tell us something
meaningful.
Historically, research in the sport and exercise studies tradition has also tended to
rely heavily on control and prediction because a major part of our research tradition
has been devoted to predicting and explaining elite athletic performance which fits
neatly into the traditional scientific paradigm of the natural sciences. Although most
university programmes in the area of sport and exercise studies include researchers
from a broad continuum of natural science (exercise physiology, biomechanics) and
social science (sport psychology and sociology) backgrounds, unequal status has been
conferred on the ‘more scientific’ researchers who can attempt to predict and control
in contrast to those who cannot (Brustad 2008).
John Smith’s (2009) refreshingly ‘subversive’ perspective on validity issues in
social science research should remind us that knowledge generation will, and probably
should, always be a contentious process because the debate itself reflects temporal and
historical aspects of the knowledge development enterprise. Qualitative research in
sport and exercise studies has also evolved according to various historical and social
forms of influence. The ‘truth through method’ ideology has carried considerable
weight in sport and exercise studies research, but it is essential that qualitative
researchers focus first on the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of doing research and let the ‘how’
follow from a logical, rather than a prescribed, process. And to reiterate Smith’s point,
how we judge the quality of our research depends upon who we are and what we wish
to become.

Notes on contributor
Robert Brustad is a Professor of Sport and Exercise Science at the University of Northern Colo-
rado, Greeley, Colorado and former editor of the Journal of sport and exercise psychology.

References
Brustad, R.J., 2008. Qualitative research approaches. In: T.S. Horn, ed. Advances in sport
psychology. 3rd ed. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 31–43.
Culver, D.M., Gilbert, W.D., and Trudel, P., 2003. A decade of qualitative research in sport
psychology journals: 1990–1999. The sport psychologist, 17, 1–15.
 Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise 115

Faulkner, G. and Biddle, S. J. H., 2004. Exercise and depression: considering variability and
contextuality. Journal of sport & exercise psychology, 6, 52–69.
Krane, V., Andersen, M.B., and Strean, W.B., 1997. Issues of qualitative research methods
and presentation. Journal of sport & exercise psychology, 19 (2), 213–218.
Smith, J.K., 2009. Judging research quality: from certainty to contingency. Qualitative
research in sport and exercise, 2, 91–100.
Whittemore, R., Chase, S.K., and Mandle, C.L., 2001. Validity in qualitative research.
Qualitative Health Research, 11 (4), 522–537.
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