Social Science |

To address the alarming injury rate in youth footballers in Sweden, the project Injury-Free Children and Adolescents: Towards Better Practice in Swedish Football (FIT project) seeks to fill in the knowledge gaps by bringing biomedical and social science together.

With its multi-angled and interdisciplinary approach, the project involves a sample of male and female Swedish football players aged 10 to 19, in order to provide concrete, evidence-based recommendations for injury prevention strategies for the use of sporting federations, sport education institutions, coaches, sport support staff, as well as players.

Having received funding by the Swedish Research Council for Sport Science, the grant proposal is published in the open-access journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO Journal). Currently finalising its data collection stage, FIT project is being conducted at the Department of Food and Nutrition, and Sport Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, by PhD student Solveig Hausken, Dr Natalie Barker-Ruchti, Dr Astrid Schubring and Prof Stefan Grau.

While injuries in youth athletes could potentially instigate injuries later on in their careers or even force them to drop out of sport, so far, research has focused almost exclusively on the biomedical perspective and the identification of clinical and mechanical risk factors. However, little is known about the role of socio-cultural risk factors.

In contrast, FIT Project turns simultaneously to the disciplines of biomechanics, sport medicine, sport coaching and sport sociology. The researchers conducted laboratory tests to determine the physical and sport-specific dispositions of each player; handed out questionnaires to register details about experienced injury; performed interviews with both coaches and players to shed light on the coaching-training dynamics; and made direct observations on the coaching methods and coach-athlete relationships within the sporting context. Each of these sub-studies is meant to produce a separate dataset to be subjected to an interdisciplinary analysis.

“The FIT project is a rare example of how injury research can integrate biomedical and social science disciplines to produce multiple data sets and an interdisciplinary data analysis procedure,” the team explains.

The researchers expect to identify injury risk factors including: growth and maturation; injury history and general health; biomechanical and clinical parameters; training factors such as training intensity and recovery time between trainings; and contextual factors such as pressure to perform, athletic ideals and knowledge of coaches about injury prevention.

Starting in January 2019, a pilot analysis including the multiple datasets will be conducted. The team will be publishing updates on the FIT project’s progress on its website.

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Original source:

Hausken S, Barker-Ruchti N, Schubring A, Grau S (2018) Injury-Free Children and Adolescents: Towards Better Practice in Swedish Football (FIT project). Research Ideas and Outcomes 4: e30729. https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.4.e30729

While advertising and promotion in general, specifically observed within the American society, is a largely researched topic, Dr János Tóth, Kodolányi János University of Applied Sciences, and the undergraduate students from the Karoli Gaspar University of the Reformed Church in Hungary have had their curiosity and attention drawn to a specific non-American and, therefore, underrepresented in such studies environment, namely the Maltese city of Msida.

Their grant proposal, published in the open-access Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO), was funded under the framework of the New Széchényi Plan, so that the team could travel to the University of Malta, with whose help they surveyed the cultural tourists’ attitudes towards advertising in the Maltese city.

Through their trip to the Mediterranean island country and the additional distance work in collaboration with the University of Malta, the team conducted a two-stage research in the area with a focus on visual advertisements located at popular tourist sites. There, the students applied the knowledge they had acquired in their university modules, such as Research Methods, Marketing Research, and Marketing Communication, to attain original scientific results about both the cultural tourists’ attitudes towards visual advertisements and the used text-level persuasion tools.

In the first phase of the project, the researchers carried out a survey at popular tourist sites, attended by international tourists. In such an environment advertisements need to appeal to visitors with different national and cultural backgrounds.

Then, in the second part of the study, the researchers examined the tools and techniques of persuasive communication in public advertising. They focused on cultural tourist sites, where advertisement is more specifically targeted. Although the visitors at such places are just as highly diverse in terms of their socio-cultural background, they have been drawn there by a relatively common goal. In fact, the researchers refer to these sites as advertisements on their own.

In their paper, the team have also listed a number of benefits they intend to reap as a result of their survey. They have counted knowledge about the cultural tourists in Malta and their attitudes towards the local advertising techniques, as well as the opportunity to compare them with similar findings from Europe. They also intend to formulate empirical research-based recommendations to support decision makers in the marketing field. Moreover, their data and analysis are to build on the available literature concerning advertising communication and tourism research.

In order to make their research activities fully transparent and traceable, not only have they published their grant proposal in the open access Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO), but they have also included a timeline of their tour in it. During the trip itself, the students took the initiative to give real-time updates about their experience via social media networks, including Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and personal blogs.

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Photos credit:

Dr János Tóth and Karoli Gaspar University of the Reformed Church in Hungary

Original source:

Tóth J (2016) Tools of Persuasion in Visual Advertisements at Maltese Sites of Cultural Tourism: A Social Science Analysis. Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e8726. doi: 10.3897/rio.2.e8726