Representation within the sport management curricula: exploring educators’ decision making process

A qualitative approach comprising semi-structured interviews was used to investigate the topic of representation within the sport management curricula and educator's decision making process. Initially, purposive sampling was used to select participants that fit the needs of the research (Creswell and Poth, 2018), specifically sport management educators at two, post 1992, TEF Gold, teaching intensive universities in the midlands of the UK. Using publicly accessible information on the sport management course pages for the respective institutions, sport management educators were invited by email to participate in the research. Subsequently, snowball sampling was used; interviewees referred other sport management academics in their department. The final sample included 11 experienced university lecturers 6 males and 5 females). Before any interviews were conducted, interviewees were provided full disclosure of the research project and participants provided informed consent. Ethical approval was also obtained from the author’s institute. Data collection occurred during the first academic semester of 2022, between November and December. All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Participant were anonymised and pseudonyms were allocated to protect the identity of the interviewees. Recruitment of interviewees stopped when data saturation, the moment at which no new themes emerged (Fugard and Potts 2015), was reached. Data saturation occurred at 11 interviews. Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six phases of thematic analyses were used to analyse the data. NVivo was used during the qualitative coding process.