Building Research Capacity in College Recreational Sports

The field of college recreational sports is growing, but research in the field has not grown equally. To ensure that decisions are made correctly and to justify the worth of college recreational sports to administrators, it is vitally important that research within the field expand. The purpose of this article is to identify strategies for building research capacity within the NIRSA community and in departments of college recreational sports. Previous literature was examined and four strategies within the context of building research capacity emerged: (1) create a research culture in which those affiliated with a given department have comparable positive views about the role of research within the department and use research to make evidence-based decisions; (2) develop and practice research skills; (3) select or be a research mentor; and (4) provide research resources including human resources, facilities, funding, and libraries. These themes are explained in detail and implementations strategies to build research capacity within college recreational sports are given.