A Dictionary of Sports Studies (Oxford Paperback Reference) Book

*** Possible Spoilers ***

I actually enjoyed this book although it was not what I was expecting. When September rolls around and all the kids go back to school, one feels like taking up some new academic interest. I thought that Sociology might be of some use to a writer, so I used Google to locate 'Sociology 101' and scanned entries until I found a course that listed the accompanying textbook. Although the actual book was available only in the Toronto Reference Library and I didn't feel like making the trek, I found this book by the same author. It was a much earlier edition but I figured it was changed only to such an extent that university students would be required to purchase a new book every year in order to protect them from the dangers of saving money that might come from reselling course texts. So I selected it and started in.

Since this was the text accompanying a university course, I figured it would describe in detail the methods used by sociologists. It did - sort of. I'd guess that there were about 20 or so pages of the 588 that were devoted to that subject. The rest consisted of individual sociological papers - interesting perhaps - but hardly informative with respect to the practical aspects of the science.

There are two approaches to the study of sociology - quantitative (scientific) and qualitative (guesswork). This author favors the latter by a wide margin. He did explain how to conduct either type of study and he discussed in some detail the various tools and techniques that are used to gather data. Unfortunately he was a little terse when it came to explaining how the analysis - particularly of qualitative data - might be carried out. In a quantitative study statistical analysis may be used and anyone with a math background is probably pretty familiar with that; but in the case of qualitative studies, how are the results to be analyzed? Judging from what I read it appears you pretty much make it up as you go along.

The rest of the book as has been noted, consists of sociology papers. Perhaps the author was hoping that the reader might come to understand the process by reviewing the results; and, in fact, a number of authors did attempt to explain how they went about their work - at least as far as how they collected the data. It appears they seem to think that data analysis is an in-born skill.

If you'd like to read a wide-ranging smorgasbord of sociology papers then this book quite good. The papers are interesting and well written; however, if you want to understand how to analyze various aspects of modern society and draw relevant conclusions then I think you may need to look elsewhere.