A critical realist morphogenetic approach to researching sport policy: reflections on a large-scale study of policy implementation in grassroots English football

Understanding the staff cancer through the perceived experiences of varsity male soccer players

“…Two other important tenets of critical realism are epistemic fallacies and generative mechanisms (Bhaskar 1978;Wiltshire 2018). An epistemic fallacy occurs when reality is reduced to what is observed in the empirical domain, such as claiming our results are a concrete representation of the staff cancer role (Lusted 2018). To avoid committing an epistemic fallacy, we viewed our findings as historically and culturally situated (i.e., epistemic relativity), meaning that our collected dataparticipants interpretations of their perceived experiences -and subsequently our understanding of the reality of the staff cancer remains fallible (Wiltshire 2018).…”

“…We, as critical realists, view reality as stratified into three domains -the real, the actual, and the empirical (Bhaskar 1978). The real domain represents the mind-independent reality where causal mechanisms exist regardless of individual consciousness, never fully observable (Lusted 2018). When mechanisms shift into the actual domain, they become activated as events, making them observable (if experienced), such as a staff cancer berating an athlete behind closed doors (Lusted 2018).…”

“…The real domain represents the mind-independent reality where causal mechanisms exist regardless of individual consciousness, never fully observable (Lusted 2018). When mechanisms shift into the actual domain, they become activated as events, making them observable (if experienced), such as a staff cancer berating an athlete behind closed doors (Lusted 2018). On one hand, the event may be experienced by the athlete and observable to anyone standing outside the door, on the other, if no one is around to observe, then the event will only be experienced by the athlete being berated.…”

“…We used photo elicitation as a data collection method to assist the recall of participants' previous memories, perceived experiences, and emotions of their playing career that occurred within the empirical domain of reality (Harper 2002;Lusted 2018). One participant described a photograph of himself with his teammates before a game that brought forth embarrassing memories of failed performance attributed to the impact the staff cancer had on the outcome of the season.…”

Formation of Sports Public Policy within the Context of Hierarchy Governance

“…Currently, government involvement in the administration of high-performance sport remains of great interest (Gowthorp et al, 2017). At the same time the analysis of a specific aspects of sport policy, such as sport policy process interlinks with the legitimating acts (Strittmatter et al, 2018) and more common issues related to the sport public policy formation, evaluation and implementation (Osterlind, 2016;Lusted, 2018) poses continued interest of the scholars.…”