Utilizing Topic Modeling to Establish Sustainable Public Policies by Analyzing Korea’s Sports Human Rights over the Last Two Decades

Human rights violations in sports reveal that athletes are continuously exposed to violence. In Korea, the negative effects of its sports powerhouse paradigm are increasingly apparent. Although discussions on human rights in sports have progressed, academic research on this has not. Sourcing information from Korea’s Press Foundation’s big data news system from 2006 to 2023, this study used term frequency, term frequency-inverse document modeling, topic term matrix extraction through latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), and LDAvis to analyze sports human rights issues and policies over time. The results revealed topics in three timeframes: in the first policy establishment period (2006–2010), the topics ranged from “Sports Human Rights Education” to “Minimum Education for Student Athletes”. In the policy transition period (2011–2018), the topics included “Strengthening Sports Human Rights Education”, “Women’s Human Rights Issues in Sports”, and “Government-Level Investigation into Sportsdom Controversies”; and in the second policy establishment period (2019–2023), the topics included “Athlete Harassment”, “Sportsdom #MeToo Movement”, “Guarantee of Student Human Rights Convenience Facilities”, and “Guarantee of Sports Human Rights”. Better mid- to long-term plans, national efforts, and education that improve awareness of human rights in sports are needed for sustainability.