Analyse de la littérature francophone portant sur l’intervention de l’entraîneur sportif, publiée entre 1988 et 2007

Research on intervention in the sporting context should benefit practitioners who could use the information to justify their actions on the field. An analysis of the English-speaking literature has been conducted (Gilbert & Trudel, 2004); however, such an analysis has not been conducted for the literature in French. We have identified research papers published during the last two decades and have analysed them in order to compare the results to the English-speaking publications. Systematic information was coded for each article, e.g., the research subject, the overall method, the instruments used to collect data in addition to the characteristics of the participants and those of the coaching context. The annual frequency of publication of the French-speaking papers was 10 times less important than the English-speaking literature, in large part because of the limited number of available journals. The analysis of the 48 identified papers showed amongst other things that: (a) the most studied
research subject was the behaviour of the coach (60.4%), (b) there are as much quantitative studies (43.8%) as qualitative ones (41.7%), (c) the interview represented the most commonly used instrument (41.7%), and (d) male coaches were more often involved in the studies (37.5%). In the discussion, we underline the main factors leading to the increasing gap between researchers and practitioners.