The Importance of Touch in Sport: Athletes’ and Coaches’ Reflections
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examined athletes’ and coaches’ experiences of positive touch within the coach-athlete relationship, including examples of positive touch, reasons for the use of touch, and factors affecting athletes’ acceptability of touch. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 coaches and 10 athletes from various sports. Data were coded using inductive and deductive coding techniques. All participants shared examples of positive touch in sport including: hugs, high fives, physical manipulation of the body, pats on the back, hand shaking, and spotting. Positive touch was reportedly used for affective, behavioural, safety, and cultural reasons. Touch was viewed by these athletes and coaches as being important and even necessary in the sport environment and within the coach-athlete relationship provided that it was individualized and contextualized. The findings are interpreted to suggest that the recent trend to avoid touch in child-populated domains ignores the many benefits of touch for health, instruction, and development.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".