Anti-doping education in the wake of the International Standard for Education: A case study of British karate

The proposed project aims to assess how the British Karate Federation has responded the the WADA's International Standard for Education (ISE), following its introduction in 2021. The ISE is a document detailing the WADA's requirements for anti-doping education programmes, with 4 key components and comprehensive guidance. This area is of importance for anti-doping research, as few studies so far have evaluated the effectiveness of anti-doping education programmes, and those to have done so were conducted prior to the ISE.
Further, the majority of studies in the field have so far studied psychological factors linked to doping, but studies assessing how these factors are addressed in existing anti-doping education are virtually non-existent. In particular, it is important to apply these findings to martial arts and examine how anti-doping education can address the ISE's requirements, as martial arts receive higher exposure to performance-enhancing substances due to the nature of these sports and the physical strain of competition. The proposed project is to be conducted in collaboration with the British Karate Federation, with whom the researcher has a long-standing contact by virtue of practising karate herself.
The proposed project entails three studies using a mixed-methods format. The first study will investigate the state of clean sport education in karate using semi-structured interviews and a thematic analysis. Study 2 will then test a model of doping behaviour in karate using structural equational modelling, with variables based on the updated version of a key meta-analysis by Ntoumanis and colleagues (2014) that posited doping-related attitudes, norms, self-regulatory efficacy, and moral disengagement as key predictors of doping behaviours. Finally, Study 3 will aim to bring together Studies 1 and 2, by quantitatively testing whether anti-doping education influence anti-doping knowledge and key variables identified in Study 2 in the sport of karate,