ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the quality, position and relevance of social science research in sport science from a philosophical perspective. Using metaphors, such as the Socratic ‘Gadfly’, it argues that one of the major challenges the social science researcher faces is the paradigmatic differences in sport science and the dominance of the natural/biological science paradigm in most cases. Discussions of the quality of anything require a basis for the evaluation. It will be argued that the basis for that evaluation of the overall quality of research in Sport Science in general seems to have been dominated by the paradigm of the natural/biological sciences and, in many instances, this dominance may have contributed to a more negative evaluation of social science research in Sport Science. The chapter suggests that building meta-theory is important and that the builders could benefit from adopting Harold Brown and Cliff Hooker’s model of rationality, which is an outgrowth of Winch’s ‘idea of a social science’.
