Introduction

Since the announcement in July 2005 that London had successfully won the bid to host the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, its aspirational message of ‘legacy’ has brought a number of concerns for social policy into sharp relief. To be held in some of the country's most disadvantaged boroughs, much of the 2012 agenda is built around regenerating London's East End, ameliorating poverty and transforming the lives of children and young people in these areas. The capacity for the 2012 Games to leave a tangible, sustainable legacy for current and future generations remains open to debate, and is beyond the scope of this chapter. It does, however, highlight the growing intersections between sport and social policy. While sport engages with many current policy issues – crime, health, youth, unemployment, urban regeneration and social exclusion, to name but a few – it nonetheless remains an under-researched area in the field of social policy in the UK and elsewhere. It is this oversight that this chapter takes as its point of departure.

This methodological chapter explores some of the issues and challenges faced by a social researcher working in an Australian policy context. It is particularly concerned with the process and politics that underpinned an action research project conducted with a group of young Muslim, refugee women who play together in a ‘New Arrivals’ soccer team in Adelaide, South Australia. While the chapter is centrally concerned with sport, the issues it raises are of relevance to those engaged in policy research more broadly. In something of a departure from how social policy research is usually presented, the chapter focuses not on the findings of the research, but on the processes that underpin the research. The chapter begins with an overview of the soccer programme and its underlying preventative health agenda and concludes by considering the key issues of research transfer and the governance of knowledge. The social policy implications that arise from the research, particularly the need to translate research findings into meaningful, ‘measurable’ social policy, are addressed by reflecting on the dilemmas encountered when trying to translate research findings into policy practice. As is argued in the following pages, the task of social policy research is to do more than present research findings and their implications for policy; it is also to provide analysis of and reflection on the pragmatic realities that often underpin our empirical studies.