Institutional and Educators’ Implementation of Reading List Diversity: A Congruence Analysis

This qualitative research had a relativist ontology and subjective epistemology (Patton, 2023). The author began by obtaining ethical approval from their institute. During the first stage of research, the Guardian’s League table was used to generate a list of all (99) universities offering higher education degree programmes in England. To ensure trustworthiness and authenticity (Scott, 1990), the author consulted and searched the official websites of all 99 institutions using the initial key search term “reading lists”. Search specificity was increased through additional, relevant terminology, for example “reading list diversity”, “decolonise” and “decolonisation”. A separate word document was created for each institution. Information available on the website was copied to the relevant word file and uploaded to NVivo in preparation for content analysis. In total, 26/99 English universities had information related to reading list diversity and / or reading list decolonisation. Data was analysed using the systematic research method of inductive content analysis (Krippendorff, 1980).

The second research stage utilised a purposive sample to select potential interviewees that met the research needs (Smith & Sparkes, 2016). Librarians and sport lecturers at two post-1992 universities in the midlands of the UK, were identified using publicly accessible information on the institutions’ website and invited by email to participate in an online, video interview. Through snowball sampling, sport educators referred academics in their department whose details were not available on the website. The educator sample comprised 14 interviewees (6 male and 8 female); all possessed numerous years teaching experience at undergraduate level and positions ranged from assistant lecturer to associate professor. Through snowball sampling, the librarian sample comprised 10 librarians (2 male and 8 female) from four post-1992 universities in the midlands of the UK. All participants met the inclusion criteria of an academic responsible for developing sport module reading lists or a librarian. The data collection process was completed between early December 2022 and early March 2023. Interviews with educators and librarians ceased when data saturation was achieved (Saunders et al., 2018).

The data that support the findings of this study are partially available from the University of Northampton Research Explorer. A subset of the data is not publicly available due to information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.