ABSTRACT
In the concluding chapter of Sport, Violence and Society, Kevin Young returns to his key argument that studies of violence in sport, or what he prefers to call sports-related violence (SRV), must be placed in wider sociological context. Rather than viewing SRV behaviours as stand-alone entities unconnected to other elements of the sports violence (or indeed the sports) process, any sociological study of even the most narrowly defined aspect of SRV must explain how, in cause, expression and outcome, the subject matter does not operate in isolation from other aspects of this process or, in fact, from larger sociological matters. Among other issues, this chapter summarises why SRV is not easy to study from a methodological point of view, why we should not be complacent about what we think we know about SRV and why there are reasons to think both pessimistically and optimistically about SRV.
