Predominant theories, regulations and research areas regarding the free movement of sportsmen

Predominant theories, regulations and research areas regarding the free movement of sportsmen

The interest was to verify the predominant theories, regulations and research areas regarding the free movement of sportsmen. It was focusing on the EU policies, Bosman’s ruling and ToL Treaty, uniquely to identify the profile of international relations journals.  Researchers attempting to conduct a survey on the state of free movement of sportsmen have tried to provide some available courses of action. Traditionally, they can explore an extensive description of the history and trends of the sports and relevant policies, drawing upon critical developments and ultimately quantify academic production. A systematic approach can be made attainable via meta-analysis, which involves a manual analysis of various samples of articles and categorising each piece based on its methodology, results, theory and other variables of interest. Journals on international relations have been encompassed in political science meta-analyses. We needed to retrieve the most representative information on the issues regarding free movement of sportsmen. Firstly, an alternative strategy that would enable the review team to manage a massive corpus likes ours. Analysing the 1,378 downloaded articles, and ultimately categorising each one of them would be impossible; therefore, content analysis was found to be an ideal strategy for the process. When employing content analysis, software to count the word frequencies was considered more convenient and to track the occurrences of specific key terms that were predetermined in the thematic dictionaries by the various users.

Moreover, a classificatory dictionary was designed encompassing the key terms and the names of the different authors that were like to be retrieved in a journal having particular theory and methods. For example, the terms Europeanisation and integration were found in the state-centric theories since it was expected that an article applies the theories more often would be relevant. Basically, not all the matches found were considered relevant but only those articles pertaining to Bosman rulings and free movement of sportsmen.

We basically involved context rules in the dictionary to prevent more of the negative matches, especially for terms that proved polysemic and would regularly emerge in non-international relations articles. WordStart 7 software was employed. Initially, each article was classified based on the variables: journal-title, date, language and country, the content analysis was conducted. From the original 1,378 articles, 800 had no significant matches with the listed terms in our dictionary and thus were excluded.