Lots of Judo academic research, for a variety of reasons, including Judo considers itself a form of scholarship, and encourages scholarhip, as per the founder (as you no doubt know). Some on BJJ, not as much, thought.

Jooyoung Lee is a sociology professor and a BJJ black belt: https://podcast.bjjmental[...]oyoung-lee. I don't know him personally, but his podcast appears to be legit. :)

I reached out to Dr Lee and he told me there's not that much out there on bjj. At least that's established. Thanks again for the recommendation!

You do realize, that you can probably take the existing stats, on this website, and use them as the basis for your data..... Depending on the reviewing / grading counter party, how well you present the idea, how well you write it up, and their disposition. You might could even compare the data / stats here, to the stats available from another site, etc. Whether that be beltcheckers to another BJJ data set, or Beltcheckers stats, to the stats from another 'martial art' website, where members have supplied data about themselves, and it has been aggregated as stats. Or write up a case, about the LACK of BJJ academic literature in the same publishing timespace as academic Judo research, or even do the research to see if that is the case, or not. There are lots of publicly available BJJ datasets out there, including, but not limited to, Beltcheckers, which is in itself, an interesting data set, and set(s) of data.

I also published several papers on sexual predators in martial arts coaching roles, including one that exposed, with details, over 200 convicted sexual offenders, who returned to martial arts coaching roles, but several of those papers got pulled down as fast as I could publish them because several domiciles, including California, have some very interesting laws and regs, about making some of the cases, and case information, and making sex offender identity information, public, outside of narrowly prescribed ways. So, go into that area, if you like the idea of possibly being scorched earth, sued, and getting lots of death theats, from their BJJ / martial arts networks.

I'm curious if the numbers you found were out of proportion when compared to non martial arts coaching roles.

Seems like both fields would be able to attain statistical data outside of local sources, and apply them to their research in a useful way? Again, I've been living outside academia for almost 2 decades...

A bit late to the party, but how much BJJ experience is needed to be helpful to you? Like if I bullied my wife into finally coming to a class or two, would she then become a useful resource?

I hold an advanced degree in folklore which is considered an adjunct science to anthropology and sociology. I do have an interest in the traditions, superstitions and legends (and mythology) which are all very much present in BJJ circles.

Speaking of which, that reminds me Barbara (a cool black belt at Bergen Grappling) did a study on rituals in BJJ as part of her degree.