OOIR: Observatory of International Research

Papers

(The median citation count of Qualitative Research in Sport Exercise and Health is 2. The table below lists those papers that are above that threshold based on CrossRef citation counts [max. 250 papers]. The publications cover those that have been published in the past four years, i.e., from 2021-11-01 to 2025-11-01.)

Article	Citations
Towards a sportive agoraphobia of professional athletes	186
“Women shouldn’t play rugby” – the gendered and embodied experiences of women players in rugby union	32
‘At least you got to see people when you went out for a walk’: older adults’ lived, embodied experiences during COVID-19 times in the United Kingdom	24
Co-producing a physical activity intervention with and for people with severe mental ill health – the spaces story	24
Moving from barriers to collaborative action: supporting social change in community sport through action research with club leaders	23
Am I becoming better? A life-long and life-wide analysis of sport coaches’ ecological realities and (mal)adaptation in the workplace	23
Shaping (queer) orientations: affective experiences and professional changes of a transgender and intersex teacher in physical education	21
Shifting power relations in disability sport and social activism research: an emancipatory approach	20
‘Cripping’ care in disability sport: an autoethnographic study of a highly impaired high-performance athlete	19
‘The man in the middle’: mixed martial arts referees and the production and management of socially desirable risk	19
One of these is not like the other: The retrospective experiences of girl athletes playing on boys’ sports teams during adolescence	17
Feeling good, sensory engagements, and time out: embodied pleasures of running	17
“What does skateboarding mean to you?” An exploratory study of Brazilian skateboarders’ developmental experiences	16
Making moves: involved fathers experiences of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside family walking program	15
Infusing ‘post’ thinking in qualitative training using material-performative pedagogies	15
Correction	15
‘It’s easier to just keep going’: elaborating on a narrative of forward momentum in sport	14
A letter to my younger self: using a novel written data collection method to understand the experiences of athletes in Chronic Pain	14
Teachers’ perceptions of barriers and facilitators of the school environment for physical activity in schoolchildren: a qualitative study	13
Perceptions and experiences of exercise participation among persons with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: A qualitative study	13
Love, sacrifice, and rebirth: exploring the embodied narratives of retired women ballet dancers using life history interviews and body mapping	12
Understanding workplace collaboration in professional rugby coaching: a dramaturgical analysis	12
Exploring the leisure time physical activity (LTPA) experiences of women with a physical disability in India	12
Passing the emotional baton: the roles emotion expressions play amongst gymnasts during competition	12
“2032 is a dream for us”: exploring amputee football players’ understanding of classification in para-sport and its application to amputee football	12

Reaching out: help-seeking among professional male ice hockey athletes	11
A Qualitative Investigation of Teachers’ Experiences of Life Skills Development in Physical Education	11
Planning for the development of strength and conditioning coaches’ psychosocial competencies	10
Co-produced research that bridges the ‘Knowledge Gap’ to support physical activity participation in disabled children and young people with limb difference	10
Understanding the career experiences and reflections of Special Olympics Canada’s National Team Program coaches	10
Re-signifying HIV through exercise: from death sentence stigma to healthy self-perception	9
A process map of flourishing between the coach and athlete in Canadian university sport	9
Hybrid choreographic femininities: DanceSport, physical culture, and performative corporeality in contemporary China	9
Drawing strength: evaluating the Tidda Talk programme through comparative body mapping with young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women	9
You wouldn’t let your phone run out of battery: an interpretative phenomenological analysis of male professional football coaches’ well-being	8
“My biggest learning curve:” an interpretive phenomenological analysis of coaches’ experiences of working with athletes who experience a menstrual cycle	8
“Is Everybody Comfortable?”#xd; Thinking Through Co-design Approaches to Better Support Girls’ Physical Activity in Schools	8
(Re)claiming subversive spaces on TikTok: the complexities of body activisms within physical activity cultures	8
Constructions of athlete mental health post-retirement: a discursive analysis of stigmatising and legitimising versions of transition distress in the Australian broadcast media	8
“Elite but not elitist”: Negotiating race, place, class, and culture in public physical activity spaces	8
Gay men, well-being, and sport participation: A phenomenological analysis	8
Grow through what you go through: a multiple-case study of competitive bodybuilders’ experiences of learning to manage the demands of their engagement in the sport	8
Building bridges: a Qualitative exploration of the athlete – guide partnership in high-performance parasport	7
Kicking crime into touch? A critical ethnography of rugby union, masculinity, and the limits of positive youth development in youth justice	7
Moral, health, and aesthetic risks: performance-enhancing drug use and the culture of silence in the UK strongwoman community	6
A case study of alcohol use among male university rugby players	6
Multi-stakeholder perspectives on co-production: Five key recommendations following the Liverpool Co-PARS project	6
The stigma and challenges faced by retired professional male rugby players	6
Athletes with intellectual impairments and their support personnel’s experience of anti-doping	6
Motherhood and competitive coaching: six stories of generational differences in persisting and resisting gender inequities in sport	5
Choose your own story: creative non-fiction about athletes attempting to qualify for the Olympics	5
Good athlete, bad patient? Navigating life with chronic illness in U.S. collegiate sport	5
Repairing relationship conflict in community sport work: “Offender” perspectives	5
Creating space for meaningful physical activity at home: women’s stories of social interaction, micro-adventure, and the joy of feeling strong	5
Running blind: the sensory practices of visually impaired runners	5
Pumping iron for strength and power: prisoners’ perceptions of a stable body	5
‘You made us feel at home’: towards Indigenous feminist methodologies with young wāhine in sport and exercise	4
Understanding coaches’ perspectives on building trust in sport: a narrative inquiry approach	4
‘The agenda is to have fun’: exploring experiences of guided running in visually impaired and guide runners	4
Concussion in professional wrestling: agency, structure and cultural change	4
‘I like to run to feel’: embodiment and wearable mobile tracking devices in distance running	4
An exploration of the perceptions and experiences of professional ballet dancers using a wellness monitoring application	4
What helps cardiac patients exercise after treatment, and when? Understanding physical activity and exercise participation following exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation	4
The weight of stigma: Charlie and the fragility of bodies in the age of lightness	4
“Everyone does it but no one really wants to talk about it”: roles and meanings of bodily secretions in the confines of distance running groups	4
Women moving forward in pictures: using digital photographs to explore postpartum women’s physical activity experiences	4
A sport research teams’ reflections on conducting emotionally demanding research with the bereaved	4
Paying attention to tension: studying the perspectives of health care workers, sports club volunteers, and people with type 2 diabetes, engaged in public-civil physical activity collaboration	4
Combining crystallisation and creative non-fiction to develop new insights on the politically astute use of humour in sports coaching	4
Landscape of practice: a participatory approach to creating a trauma- and violence-informed physical activity social learning space	4
“More than just a walk in the park”: A multi-stakeholder qualitative exploration of community-based walking sport programmes for middle-aged and older adults	3
The fitness boom and the pursuit of body ideals: domesticating the use of smartwatches in Ghanaian fitness spaces	3
The role of athlete support personnel in preventing doping: a qualitative study of a rugby union academy	3
All roads lead to Rome? Talent narratives of elite athletes, musicians, and mathematicians	3
Gatekeeping and ableism in physical education provision for disabled children: perspectives and practices	3

Inescapable tensions: performance and/or psychological well-being in Olympic and Paralympic athletes during sport disruption	3
“I am strong, I am fast, I am powerful”: a creative art-based application of body self-compassion with racialised young women athletes in Canada	3
Whiteness, Canadian university athletic administration, and anti-racism leadership: ‘A bunch of white haired, white dudes in the back rooms’	3
Developing 'whole people': a case-study of a sports-friendly school	3
Bringing it back to show and tell: combining visual and textual data to explore a psychological construct	3
Fighting forward: purpose as a form of resilience for combat sport athletes	2
Co-creating knowledge on bicycling: a decolonial feminist participatory action research approach to arts-based methods	2
Listening to the language of the context: problematizing researcher positionality in cross-cultural sport for development ethnographies	2
Navigating the body’s double nature in a sedentary environment: Swedish primary school children’s use of physical activity during the school day	2
Beyond life-skills: talented athletes, existential learning and (Un)learning the life of an athlete	2
Talking about and coping with pain and suffering in ultrarunning as moral language	2
‘Busy as a bee’: a qualitative dual analysis of life fulfillment among Norwegian competitive recreational athlete mothers in endurance sports	2
Stories of physical activity and disability: exploring sport and exercise students’ narrative imagination through story completion	2
Understanding parents’ motives for, and beliefs about, enrolling three-to-five-year-old children into organised sporting programs	2
Exclusion, inclusion and belonging in mainstream and disability sport: Jack’s story	2
Mapping un/contested knowledge of sex/gender in high performance sport: applying Actor-Network Theory to women’s Olympic Weightlifting	2
Conducting collaborative research across global North-South contexts: benefits, challenges and implications of working with visual and digital participatory research approaches	2
‘We are all in this together’: a creative non-fiction story of older adults participating in power-assisted exercise	2
Olympic and Paralympic athletes’ perceptions of the Canadian sport environment and mental health	2
From behaviour to birdsong: reorienting the object of physical activity intervention	2
Different spokes for different folks: experiences with cycling and the bicycle from the perspective of variably-housed cyclists in Vancouver	2