An International Survey of Sports Coaches’ Knowledge, Understanding, and Definitions of Physical Literacy

Abstract

Physical literacy (PL) has become a popular term in international policy, advocacy, and practice discourses, and a part of this lies in its claimed role in bringing together traditionally distinct settings – physical education, physical activity, sports coaching (the focus of this paper) – into coherent research and practice agenda. However, questions remain about the coherence and commensurability of the definitions used within the PL field. This study explores the knowledge, understanding, and personal definitions of 521 sports coaches from 37 countries. Using Leximancer semantic software to analyse qualitative data from an international cohort of coaches, we sought to gather a relatively unbiased and trustworthy representation of their perceptions of PL. Relevance ranged from 100% for concepts 'movement,' 'physical,' and 'activity' to 8% and 6% for concepts 'coordination,' 'need,' 'control,' and 'efficiently,' respectively. The dominant accounts of PL in our sample prioritised movement skills and sport, in contrast to influential academic theories that stress multi-factorial constructs. These findings support arguments that definitions of PL are widely divergent and that the imposition of a unified conception of the term may be an unattainable and unnecessary ambition.