SHARP Research Agenda

Research Agenda

SHARP will help promote rapid advances in the understanding of gender, exercise, sports (participation and leadership), consumer behavior, and women’s health by promoting interdisciplinary research and creating a new generation of researchers committed to issues surrounding women’s and girls’ physical and sports activities. The research foci of SHARP will be some or all of the following areas:

• Olympic participation and leadership;
  
• Title IX monitoring with regard to participation;
  
• Healthy weight management across the lifespan;
  
• Motivation and exercise adherence;
  
• Youth sports participation;
  
• Sport, physical activity, and American families;
  
• Sport, health, and fitness marketing to women and girls;
  
• Injuries and injury prevention;
  
• Body image, effects of exercise/sport on the body;
  
• Management/administrative structures;
  
• Economic impact of sports participation;
  
• Sport and urban girls.
  

Activities

• Acquire, develop, and distribute research and program grants;
  
• Create and maintain a digital platform to house research materials and allow access to literature, datasets, presentations, instruments, teaching modules, policy documents, and links;
  
• Engage scholars, spokespeople, and staff as advisors and consultants across government, education, sport, and health sectors, and opinion-leader populations;
  
• Establish interdisciplinary research partnerships on the U-M campus and across the country;
  
• Train doctoral /postdoctoral students.
  

Pilot Studies

SHARP makes annual awards to support pilot studies that shed light on important issues relating to sport and physical activity for women and girls. The Center is particularly interested in projects that can inform policy conversations and issues. Collaborative and/or interdisciplinary projects are encouraged.

Research teams must be led by a principal investigator from the University of Michigan; however team members may include faculty from other universities; sport, health, or physical activity professionals; graduate students; postdoctoral fellows; and/or research scientists. Funds may be used as seed money or to support ongoing activities.

SHARP plans to fund as many as four 18-month proposals each year, with a maximum of $15,000 per award.

Priority topics of interest include:

• The relationship between women’s health across the lifespan and sport and/or physical activity (i.e., healthy weight management, nutrition, health risk behaviors);
  
• Women’s experience in sport in varying historical or cultural contexts (i.e., Title IX);
  
• Sport injuries (i.e., concussions; knee, elbow, shoulder injuries; prevalence in women and girls);
  
• Injury prevention (i.e., programs designed to improve sport training and competition and reduce sport-related injuries);
  
• The business of women’s sport (economics, marketing, sponsorship of sport, consumer behavior);
  
• Employment/Career/Leadership (climate for women in sport business, issues related to opportunity and discrimination).
  

For more information about SHARP research awards, please consult the Request for Proposals.

SHARP Pilot Study Grant Recipients

2011

Cathleen M. Connell, Ph.D. (School of Public Health: Health Behavior and Education)
Patterns of Physical Activity among a National Sample of Older Women with Diabetes

James T. Eckner, M.D. (Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation)
A Novel Assessment of Head Impact Biomechanics in Female Athletes

Kathryn Heinze Ph.D. (Kinesiology: Sport Management)
Who Will Pay for Girls to Play? Assessing the Influence of Individual and Community-level Factors on Support for Girls’ Sports

Scott McLean Ph.D. (Kinesiology: Athletic Training)
Habitual Loading and the Maturing Female Knee: Reducing the Risk of ACL Injuries

Susan Woolford, M.D., M.P.H. (Medical School: Pediatrics)
Hair, Activity, Identity and Race (HAIR) Study