Researching pain and injury in sport

In this paper I trace my growing involvement from the early 1990s in the sociology of pain and injury, which was then a relatively new area of study. I outline some of my research in this area, explaining how the research grew out of, and was guided by, my earlier work in the sociology of medicine. I then provide an overview of the current state of knowledge in the area, and suggest that, both in relation to athletes’ subjective experiences of pain and injury and in relation to the social organisation of sports medicine, there is a good deal of empirical consensus between researchers. But while the richness of much of the empirical data is beyond doubt, there is perhaps now a need for more theoretically-driven research. This could involve drawing more systematically upon general sociological theories and, more particularly, drawing upon the cognate subdiscipline of medical sociology, where closer alignment would seem to have obvious mutual benefits.