Conclusions and future directions in doing qualitative sport research

This chapter pulls together the synergies, observations and trends across 33 qualitative university researchers, policy-making, community organisations and local delivery organisations in community sport project implementation. It not only provides an overview of the challenges, opportunities and exciting new realms of qualitative research but also specifically illustrates the need to resist and challenge assumptions about working in the neoliberal work, university and societal settings. This chapter also provides support for focused use by readers in the chosen methods, methodologies and tools of analysis they select and play with in their work. As we look for ever more immersive and embedded co-produced research in the landscape of qualitative research in sport studies, we must also be aware of the challenges we face. For some, inability to embed is core to the nature of their ethnographic practitioner–researcher project; for others, the ‘field’ comes with inherent ‘firsts’: a first comfortable look and a first sexist, homophobic or racist comment thrown away in passing or within a research interview. It may be that, as a doctoral researcher doing your fieldwork, you were positioned as an insider, but barriers and limitations to conducting what you’d assumed to be a neat linear methodological step soon gave way to very clear ECR conundrums. This chapter wishes to make it O.K. to talk about these less comfortable components of doing the work we love.