Lived experience and community sport coaching: A phenomenological investigation

Coaching in the participation domain as the act of coaching participants that are less intensely engaged in sport than performance orientated athletes. This form of coaching is a popular activity occurring in community settings such as schools or sport clubs, and it is often undertaken with a broad range of social and health outcomes in mind. The experiences and practices of the large army of 'community coaches' have been under-explored in comparison to those of elite performance coaches who focus on competitive success and dominate much academic research. This study focuses on the little known world of the community coach. Drawing on the philosophy of phenomenologists such as Husserl, and in particular the methodology of Van Manen, the study explored the lived experiences of a single case study community coach. Derived from semi-structured interviews and in keeping with Van Manen's methodology, findings are presented in a narrative format. The narrative describes the 'lifeworld' of the coach and seeks to identify the 'essential features' of community coaching in this case. Specifically, the narrative illustrates a dichotomy in the lifeworld of the coach; between a frenetic practical delivery mode visible in the public arena and a 'hidden' largely unknown, private world used predominantly for planning and organising. For this case study coach, the essence of community coaching lay in two complementary activities; planning and then delivering fun based activities that achieved social, health and sporting outcomes. Additionally, interacting with others, such as parents, carers and teachers was identified as an essential feature of this coach's experience. © 2013 © 2013 Taylor & Francis

Brief Encounters with Qualitative Methods in Health Research: Phenomenology and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Developed from a strong philosophical tradition, phenomenological research puts human experience at the heart of the research process. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, in particular, is a methodological stance that embraces the lived and subjective views of those who experience a given phenomenon. This flexible and descriptive approach provides researchers with an opportunity to depict and situate lived experience in rich contextual detail, while also accounting for the meaning-making of participants. Given the importance of patient/client voice, and a personalised view of health, phenomenological methods such as IPA can contribute extensively to health research by providing rich contextual accounts of experience which shed light on the essences of important phenomena

'Sinking and swimming in disability coaching': an autoethnographic account of coaching in a new context

In terms of achieving wider health and social outcomes, sport coaching promises much for young people with disabilities. Despite this promise, the experiences and practices of those coaches who enter the disability sport arena are underexplored. This is particularly so for coaches who operate in community participation rather than competitive elite environments. Accordingly, this paper uses an autoethnographic approach to explore the experiences of a basketball coach (Colum), who enters a youth club for disabled participants for the first time. Utilising observational data, reflective field notes, and interviews, five relativist vignettes are collaboratively constructed to represent Colum’s (a pseudonym) experiences across 12 basketball sessions. The vignettes reveal that the disability and community context disrupted Colum’s normative coaching behaviours. An emotional laborious journey is recounted that includes significant lessons, which may impact coaching practitioners, researchers and sport development officers. In addition, the post-sport context (Atkinson, 2010a) is introduced to differentiate the youth club context from Colum’s normative sport context. Furthermore, the concepts of liminality and ludic, which are novel to extant coaching literature, are introduced to explain how and why Colum struggled to find structure within the context of a youth club for disabled participants

REFERQUAL: A pilot study of a new service quality assessment instrument in the GP Exercise Referral scheme setting

Background The development of an instrument accurately assessing service quality in the GP Exercise Referral Scheme (ERS) industry could potentially inform scheme organisers of the factors that affect adherence rates leading to the implementation of strategic interventions aimed at reducing client drop-out. Methods A modified version of the SERVQUAL instrument was designed for use in the ERS setting and subsequently piloted amongst 27 ERS clients. Results Test re-test correlations were calculated via Pearson's 'r' or Spearman's 'rho', depending on whether the variables were Normally Distributed, to show a significant (mean r = 0.957, SD = 0.02, p < 0.05; mean rho = 0.934, SD = 0.03, p < 0.05) relationship between all items within the questionnaire. In addition, satisfactory internal consistency was demonstrated via Cronbach's 'α'. Furthermore, clients responded favourably towards the usability, wording and applicability of the instrument's items. Conclusion REFERQUAL is considered to represent promise as a suitable tool for future evaluation of service quality within the ERS community. Future research should further assess the validity and reliability of this instrument through the use of a confirmatory factor analysis to scrutinise the proposed dimensional structure

Care in Community Sports Coaching

Although increasingly associated with rational and objective scientific processes, sports coaching is nonetheless a social activity. More specifically, sports coaching always involves a relationship between a coach and athlete / participant (Cronin & Armour, 2017; Jowett, 2007). This chapter aims to explore the perspective that coaching relationships are essentially caring relationships, and that the care facet of these relationships has hitherto been taken for granted and undervalued (Cronin & Armour, 2018; Jones, Bailey, & Santos, 2013; Jones, 2009). In doing so, the chapter argues that both community sports coaching policy and practice are implicitly concerned with care. Yet, to date, care has largely been under theorised and marginalised in coaching policy and practice. Indeed, to a large extent, coaching discourse is dominated by a concern for what performers do (i.e., sport and physical activity) rather than performers themselves (Harthill & Lang, 2014). This does not mean that coaching policy is not well intentioned, nor that coaching is wholly without caring practice. On the contrary, good caring practice does exist, but it is perhaps not as widespread and explicit as it should be. To address this challenge, the later section of the chapter details examples of care in coaching from across international contexts. This is a valuable resource that will prompt coaches, coach educators, employers, and policy makers to consider how they can ensure that care is not peripheral to, but rather at the heart of the coaching process. After all, caring about communities and their inhabitants is essential to community sports coaching

Dimensionality and dynamics in the behavior of C. elegans

A major challenge in analyzing animal behavior is to discover some underlying simplicity in complex motor actions. Here we show that the space of shapes adopted by the nematode C. elegans is surprisingly low dimensional, with just four dimensions accounting for 95% of the shape variance, and we partially reconstruct "equations of motion" for the dynamics in this space. These dynamics have multiple attractors, and we find that the worm visits these in a rapid and almost completely deterministic response to weak thermal stimuli. Stimulus-dependent correlations among the different modes suggest that one can generate more reliable behaviors by synchronizing stimuli to the state of the worm in shape space. We confirm this prediction, effectively "steering" the worm in real time.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, minor correction

Sociology, Curriculum Studies and Professional Knowledge: New Perspectives on the Works of Michael Young edited by David Guile, David Lambert and Michael J. Reiss, London, Routledge, 2018, 292, £88, ISBN: 9781138675834

Curricula have been the subject of sociological consideration for some time. In the UK, this interest has recently burgeoned, driven in part by policy makers such as the Scottish and Welsh Governments who have, to greater and lesser extents, reformed their school curricula. In England specifically, the educational inspectorate, OFTSED, has also challenged teachers and school leaders to consider the intent, implementation and evaluation of their curricula. Of course, the annual ‘PISA’ rankings also prompt consideration of curricula across international contexts. Against this backdrop, Guile’s, Lambert’s and Reiss’s book is a welcome text that adds insight on the sociology of education, curriculum studies and professional knowledge. To do so, the book uses the work of Michael Young as a basis for 20 chapters by individual authors. This approach is warranted because Young has been a key figure in the sociology of education since the 1970s when he vigorously argued for social constructivist approaches to education. More recently, he has adopted a social realist perspective and argues for greater appreciation of knowledge to empower individuals with the ‘power to do something’ in their lives. The book is a scholarly response to Young’s arguments, and it provides a welcome consideration of how and why curricula may be designed and implemented to benefit learners. That said, the text is neither an introduction to Young’s work, nor a practical manual on how to design curricula. Rather, it is a well-edited collection of chapters, authored by a gamut of senior scholars, who critically challenge and extend Young’s research. Indeed, each chapter provides insights that are valuable for those who wish to theorise education, curricula and professional knowledge from sociological perspectives. Accordingly, I recommend the text to postgraduate students and academics who seek, not only to prescribe education, curricula and knowledge, but to understand it from varied theoretical perspectives

Ethics in youth sport: policy and pedagogical applications

Book Revie

Nemo: a computational tool for analyzing nematode locomotion

The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans responds to an impressive range of chemical, mechanical and thermal stimuli and is extensively used to investigate the molecular mechanisms that mediate chemosensation, mechanotransduction and thermosensation. The main behavioral output of these responses is manifested as alterations in animal locomotion. Monitoring and examination of such alterations requires tools to capture and quantify features of nematode movement. In this paper, we introduce Nemo (nematode movement), a computationally efficient and robust two-dimensional object tracking algorithm for automated detection and analysis of C. elegans locomotion. This algorithm enables precise measurement and feature extraction of nematode movement components. In addition, we develop a Graphical User Interface designed to facilitate processing and interpretation of movement data. While, in this study, we focus on the simple sinusoidal locomotion of C. elegans, our approach can be readily adapted to handle complicated locomotory behaviour patterns by including additional movement characteristics and parameters subject to quantification. Our software tool offers the capacity to extract, analyze and measure nematode locomotion features by processing simple video files. By allowing precise and quantitative assessment of behavioral traits, this tool will assist the genetic dissection and elucidation of the molecular mechanisms underlying specific behavioral responses.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures. accepted by BMC Neuroscience 2007, 8:8