Understanding in-situ complexities: a scoping review on the trends of qualitative method design and practice in coach-athlete dialogue studies

Sport pedagogue–learner interactions encompass complex dynamics of (who, what, when, where, why, and how) speaking and listening acts. As discursive practice normatively frames certain embodied, pedagogic, and socio-cultural values/biases beyond information transmission, coach–athlete dialogues (CADs) mediate their way of being-in-the-world across multi-dimensions. Recognising this significance, a growing body of qualitative coaching research has applied methodological creativity to seize the in-situ moments of CADs and grasp their emergent, contextual, and nuanced nature, instead of repeating the prominent tendency to manufacture CAD into half-stories of coaches’ behaviours as speakers or athletes’ perceptions as listeners. Nonetheless, the methodological trajectories of such qualitative research (i.e. extant progress, potential limitations, and possible future directions) have seldom been scrutinised. Therefore, this article presents a scoping review on the design and practice of qualitative methods used in 41 CAD studies published from 2000 to 2024. The analysis reveals four major themes: (i) instructor-centred perspective; (ii) space before place; (iii) insufficient attention to non-verbal language-use-in-interaction; and (iv) imbalance of emic–etic approaches. The findings are expected to provide qualitative coaching researchers with reflexive sources for their own and participants’ CAD-related reality (ontology) and knowledge (epistemology), especially when crafting the method design and practice to better uncover the in-situ complexities of sport coaching.