Researching sport in a ‘Total Institution’: reflections on research barriers and methodological adaptations in a study of prison physical culture
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper reflects on the methodological challenges faced during a qualitative research project on sport and physical culture in the Canadian federal prison system, during which the author tried and failed to gain access to observe sport programming and conduct interviews in two prisons. The paper has three principal aims. Firstly, to self-reflexively analyse the experience of failing to gain access to a research site and the subsequent methodological adaptations undertaken. Secondly, to assess the difficulties for scholars of sport and physical culture of researching in a ‘total institution’. And thirdly, to advocate for the use of bricolage in sports studies, as both a methodological tactic for researching difficult-to-access sites or subcultures and an interpretive analytical tool. This paper fills a unique void in the literature on sport research in total institutions, offering a critical and reflexive methodological examination of the barriers to qualitative research at such sites. It will be of particular interest to researchers of sport and physical culture who must find creative methodological solutions to research barriers, particularly in sites, subcultures and organisations to which access is severely restricted.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.039 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it