The Learning in Development Research Framework for Sports Organizations

Research has shown how social and cultural factors continually shape an athlete’s development journey. For example, the types of practice designed, which individuals are identified as talented and the characteristics that distinguish a good coach, are continually shaped by sociocultural constraints. This potential for a myriad of possible complex and ill-defined challenges (a wicked problem), highlights a need for a framework to guide both research and practice within specific sports organizations. In this paper, we present the Learning in Development Research Framework (LDRF), a deeply contextualized, transdisciplinary approach to action research that is founded in ecological dynamics that utilizes the Skilled Intentionality Framework (SIF) to capture the role of sociocultural forces in shaping athlete development. Further, we present a practical example from a professional football club highlighting the main aim of the LDRF: that player development frameworks should evolve in, interaction with the specific sociocultural context in which practitioners and individuals are embedded. The implication is that there is no ‘copy and paste’ templates. Practitioners and applied scientists should seek to comprehend the distinct contextual complexities of cultures, communities and situations as they encounter them, co-creating practices that, respectively, amplify and dampen helpful and unhelpful aspects of sport forms of life.