Missing Data: Current Practice in Football Research and Recommendations for Improvement
Missing data are often unavoidable. The reason values go missing, along with decisions made of how missing data are handled (deleted or imputed), can have a profound effect on the validity and accuracy of study results. In this article, we aimed to: estimate the proportion of studies in football research that included a missing data statement, highlight several practices to avoid in relation to missing data, and provide recommendations for exploring, visualising and reporting missingness. Football related articles, published in 2019 were studied. A survey of 136 articles, sampled at random, was conducted to determine whether a missing data statement was included. As expected, the proportion of studies in football research that included a missing data statement was low, at only 11.0% (95% CI: 6.3% to 17.5%); suggesting that missingness is seldom considered by researchers. We recommend that researchers describe the number and percentage of missing values, including when there are no missing values. Exploratory analysis should be conducted to explore missing values, and visualisations describing missingness overall should be provided in the paper, or at least supplementary materials. Missing values should almost always be imputed, and imputation methods should be explored to ensure they are appropriately representative. Researchers should consider these recommendations, and pay greater attention to missing data and its influence on research results.