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The majority of research participants in the social sciences are recruited from populations that are Western , educated , industrialized , rich , and democratic. This has the potential to threaten the external validity and limit the generalizability of research findings. It also highlights the need to provide a historical accounting of participant characteristics and reporting practices across coherent disciplines of research. This paper reports the participant characteristics from studies published in 12 leading journals in the sport and exercise psychology literature. In total, 15,650 peer-reviewed articles were published across these outlets from 1930 to 2021, involving 4,487,437 human participants. A descriptive overview of participant characteristics and reporting practices suggests that empirical understanding of human experiences and outcomes in sport and exercise settings is built from an incomplete and unrepresentative sample of participants. Findings illuminate potential knowledge gaps that may have resulted from the lack of diverse samples and offer potential paths forward for contemporary sport and exercise psychology scholars who wish to address these gaps. • 15,650 articles with 4,487,437 human participants have been published across 12 sport and exercise psychology journals from 1930 to 2021. • 75.6% of participants from these studies have been drawn from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. • Across this literature, many important participant characteristics have gone uncollected and/or unreported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on parental involvement in youth sport is largely unknown. The objective of the study presented in this paper was to understand parental involvement in relation to their child's participation in organised sport during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using an interpretive descriptive methodology, online qualitative interviews and online focus groups with parents and youth (15–18 years) (n = 29) were conducted during June 2020. Following a rigorous reflexive thematic analysis, four themes illustrated the nature of sport parenting during this stressful and uncertain period: (a) reshaping sport parenting identity, (b) the unexpected growth of sport parenting responsibilities, (c) responding to children's loss of sport, and (d) policies impact family commitment and attitudes to returning to sport. The findings are discussed considering Harwood and Knight's (2015) postulates of parenting expertise in sport and offer potential ideas to better support parents and children situated in unexpectedly stressful situations. • Parents reshaped their sport identity during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. • Parents experienced a rapid and unexpected growth in responsibility as a sport parent. • Parental attunement and responsiveness to their children's needs was higher during lockdown. • Constant policy changes challenged parents' capacity to provide logistical support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]