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Editorial
Methodological and ethical limitations of interpersonal violence research in Sports and Exercise Medicine: advancing an athlete-centred approach
  1. Yetsa A Tuakli-Wosornu1,
  2. Natalie R Galea2,
  3. Kirsty Forsdike3,
  4. Jelena G MacLeod4
  1. 1 Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Yale University School of Public Health, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
  2. 2 Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne (AUS), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
  3. 3 La Trobe Business School, La Trobe University (AUS), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
  4. 4 Yale Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr Yetsa A Tuakli-Wosornu, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Yale University School of Public Health, New Haven, Connecticut, USA; yetsa.tuakli-wosornu{at}yale.edu

https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2023-106754

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    Interpersonal violence against athletes in sport can be insidious, systemic and normalised. As such, studying interpersonal violence can be methodologically and ethically challenging for Sports and Exercise Medicine (SEM) scientists and other athlete-facing researchers.1 We argue that a specialised approach is needed: one that is athlete-centred, trauma-informed, human-rights-based and ethics-based, accountable to the complexities of sport (figure 1) and balances the potential benefits of screening, study recruitment and population-level prevalence data, against the ethical obligation to provide safety-net environments and therapeutic resources once interpersonal violence is identified.2 Here we present the need to think through the role and impact of research methodology in harm-prevention and healing among affected sportspeople at the heart of interpersonal violence research.

    Figure 1

    Similarities between the sports environment and other complex sociocultural contexts (non-exhaustive list). (1) Similar to a community-based peer group, peer pressure in sport can feel inevitable and hypnotic at times; (2) similar to an educational setting such as a classroom, learning, skill acquisition, hierarchy and personal development have primacy in the sports environment; (3) similar to a religious institution, the devotion and emotion of sport can reach levels of fervour; (4) similar to a family household, parental-type and sibling-type roles naturally occur in training groups; (5) similar to a military unit, camaraderie and a sense of country/team above …

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    Footnotes

    • Twitter @YetsaTuakli

    • Correction notice This article has been corrected since it published Online First. The third affiliation has been amended.

    • Contributors YAT-W and NRG conceived of the initial idea and developed early drafts. KF and JGM advanced key concepts and contributed to later drafts. All authors approved of the final submission.

    • Funding Jelena G MacLeod is supported by the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) Training Program Grant T32MH018268-38. No other authors are supported.

    • Competing interests YAT-W is an Associate Editor with the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Supplemental material This content has been supplied by the author(s). It has not been vetted by BMJ Publishing Group Limited (BMJ) and may not have been peer-reviewed. Any opinions or recommendations discussed are solely those of the author(s) and are not endorsed by BMJ. BMJ disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on the content. Where the content includes any translated material, BMJ does not warrant the accuracy and reliability of the translations (including but not limited to local regulations, clinical guidelines, terminology, drug names and drug dosages), and is not responsible for any error and/or omissions arising from translation and adaptation or otherwise.