Sport, medicine and health: a research agenda for social scientists

This paper explores the ways in which social scientists should respond to the increasing prominence of health and medicine within sports science research agendas. It first reviews the research which has already been conducted on these themes, identifying core bodies of work on pain and injury, sport and health and the social organization of sports medicine. It then seeks to highlight the comparisons between the sociology of sport and the sociology of medicine, identifying existing areas of overlap and interchange between these two sociological sub-disciplines. Finally it develops a research agenda for the future, consisting of more differentiated and nuanced understandings of sportspeoples’ illness/injury experiences, a development of critiques of the sport-health ideology which locate physical activity campaigns within public health more broadly, a scrutiny of the global inequalities which shape athlete health and illness, and an exploration of the impact of elite sports medicine on public health provision.