Abstract

Sport is one of the quite complex social institutions. Sport can be perceived and explored in various contexts – sport and mass media, sport and politics, social integration and exclusion in sport, sport and education, globalization studies in sport and many more (Lewis, 2009). This all illustrates the complexity of sport. Despite of our interpretation of sport one thing is clear – sport has great impact on society and individuals life. This makes sport an attractive research area for various researches from different disciplines. Sociologists are not an exception. Sociologists are using own research methods, sociological theories and particular skills in order to unclose and show the impact of sport on social structure, individual identity, pop culture, emphasize causal aspects of social conflicts it is creating or eliminating (McPherson, et. al., 1989). The aim of the article is to unclose the object of sociology of sport and indicate the main research tendencies. Sociology of sport is relatively young branch of sociology, despite that it has strong positions among other branches of sociology. The range of subjects of main researches in sociology of sport is very broad: studies of discrimination, sport and mass media including pop culture, social mobility on the basis of sport, social problems in sport including drugs and sports violence, sport and politics. In Lithuania, sociology of sport yet is at the beginning on the way to glory and recognition among the other disciplines. Despite the fact that it is getting popular to use sociological research methods in the field of sport, a lot of challenges is still waiting for pioneers of sociology of sport to deal with. Classification of wide range research subjects of sociology of sport depends on author’s intention. In this article, research subjects of sociology of sport are classified in three groups according to its importance and popularity. The main three groups are: researches of social integration and exclusion in sport (care about the relation between sport and social inclusion, finding out what are the contexts of social exclusion and discrimination in sport, illustrating subcultures of sport world); researches of sport and mass media (care about the relation between sport and mass media, finding out about commercialization of sport, illustrating and investigating stereotypical men and women representation in mass media); globalization studies and comparative analysis (investigating impact of globalization on sport, care about impact of technologies on sport and its perspectives, finding out about the challenges for sport in global world, with the help of comparative analysis illustrating the role of sport in different societies). Verf.-Referat