Content lexical analysis on interdisciplinary in Sport sciences

Abstract

Interdisciplinary research in Sport Sciences is a challenge, a fortiori when one aspires to more than basic multidisciplinarity (i.e. the distinct studies of a given objet by several scientific disciplines). While calling to the coverage of societal questions (e.g. health status of the populations) several sponsors invite researchers to go beyond such perspectives. Moreover, some researchers from different domains tend to collaborate with the aim to develop a unitary approach of a given object (e.g. collaborations between psychologists and neuroscientists in the study of motor control). Some attempts to produce more transversal conceptual frameworks may also be noticed (e.g. the courses of action approach). From such standpoint the present study examined the conceptions of interdisciplinarity among European senior researchers in Sport sciences. The interviews of a sample of such researchers chosen for their affinity with interdisciplinarity (50% of them specialized in Social sciences and humanities and 50% specialized in Life sciences) have been analyzed with the support of Alceste plus© software. The results of the lexical analysis allowed a categorical analysis resulting in the determination of the reference worlds of the speeches, thus to the sense of the lexical categories. A preliminary study (8 interviews, 28 775 forms, 874 lexems and 702 elementary unities of context) led to hierarchical descendent classifications allowing the determination of 7 lexical categories. The subsequent categorical analysis led to the determination of 3 reference worlds underlining: 1) the development of methods applicable to several objects of study and scientific areas; 2) the appeal to methods of a specific domain to direct and/or validate the analysis of data gathered via methods and tools of another scientific domain; 3) a reflection on the institutional and managerial conditions favorable to interdisciplinary research (notably relative to the academic world and to the industry) and on the direction of the corresponding research projects (to reduce the gaps between the ecology of a social domain of activity and the scientific reductionism and/or the study of an epiphenomenon vs. the study of a corresponding underlying process). A content analysis of EDSS abstracts relative to PE (produced from 1996 to 2014) will be shortly realized as a complement to the interviews with the purpose to produce the state of the art on interdisciplinarity and of its possible variations compared with the reflection on interdisciplinarity in Sport sciences among senior researchers.