Introduction

Analyzing the Presence of Homosexually- Themed Language Among Association Football Fans in the United Kingdom

“…All the authors are aware that online surveys like ours adopt non-probability sampling methods through participants self-selecting whether to take part or not, but given the study’s overall focus and our intention to capture a wide range of views from fans of football clubs across the UK, we felt this was the right approach. One of the advantages of online surveys is that they allow the participant to complete it in their own time and avoid the potential bias of social desirability that can occur on a subject like this with face-to-face research (Cleland et al, 2019). No prizes or monetary reward was given for participation; instead, our aim was for participants to complete it as honestly as they could.…”

The Paralympics on YouTube: Alternative content creation and the digital consumption of the Paralympics

“…The technological changes we discussed above do not solely and directly influence the available repertoire of (digital) social research methodologies (Cleland et al ., 2019). Ultimately, they have also transformed the practices of doing research and, indeed, these transformations led to the rise of a digital sociological tradition (Lupton, 2014).…”

“…In this article, we subscribe to the overarching digital sociological perspective that, broadly, suggest that digital places such as social media platforms must be seriously engaged with as data sources that can help us understand broader cultural and social processes (Petersen-Wagner, 2017b). This is also the case in the world of sport, where digital places have been utilised by scholars exploring diverse media-related, socio-cultural and political processes emerging in or embedded throughout sport (Millward, 2008; Cleland et al ., 2019; David and Millward, 2012). Nevertheless, the embrace of digital places as data sources come with associated challenges to empirical social scientists because the plethora of data – or big data (see Mamo et al ., 2022) – can lead to a point where granularity is potentially lost when we only consider the wider picture (Burrows and Savage, 2014).…”