Contextualised skill acquisition research: a new framework to study the development of sport expertise

Abstract

Background: Under the view of dynamical system theory, expertise in sports emerges from the interaction of multiple constraints. At an individual level, important interactions amongst constraints could include the relationships that evolve between one's family, playmates/coaches, and specific training activities. Or more broadly, other environmental constraints can be the strong socio-cultural-historical contexts that influence expertise development in sports around the world, such as rugby (e.g. New Zealand) and football (e.g. Brazil). An increasing number of studies have demonstrated the influence of environmental constraints on the development of sport expertise. Whilst making important contributions to knowledge, such studies have been limited in scope and fail to consider in depth how informal and even aversive learning environment constraints affect skills development.

Objective: The objective of this paper is to outline a new contextualised approach to studying socio-cultural constraints on individuals, proposing an interpretive, multi-method approach to holistically investigate the interacting constraints on an athlete's development pathway.

Aims: We explain a rationale for adopting an interpretive research paradigm (in contrast to traditional positivist approaches) for exploring socio-cultural constraints. The epistemological and methodological assumptions of Bronfenbrenner's Bioecological Model of Human Development are proposed as an underpinning framework for data collection and organisation of material. We advocate for ethnographic strategies of inquiry, followed by a discussion of potential methods for generating and analysing data: contextual analysis, participant-observation, and open-ended interviews. Finally, we discuss evaluation criteria for this contextualised approach viewed from a coherence theory of truth.

Purpose: This position statement seeks to: (1) promote methodological possibilities to investigate the effect of socio cultural constraints on expertise acquisition in sport and (2) offer significant new theoretical and epistemological insights from the constraints-led approach to expertise and to integrate some of the interdisciplinary differences that exist in the body of sciences.

Final thoughts: Our tentative contribution to the development of the proposed contextualised skill acquisition research framework is to build bridges across the methodological boundaries between sociology and motor learning in the first instance, rather than offering a unifying approach for the whole field. We hope that this position statement will provide a foundation for future related empirical papers and to stimulate other researchers to consider the framework for their own investigations of motor learning in the field.

Keywords:

• sociocultural constraints
• ethnography
• constraints-led approach
• bioecological model
• coherence theory of truth

Notes

1. Postpositivists believe that reality exists, as positivists do. But such reality is imperfectly attainable due to the inevitable influence of the researcher (for further details, see Guba 1990).

2. Poststructuralism refers to a school of thought that is very similar to the theoretical perspectives of postmodernism (Fawcett 2008). ‘One general distinction (with many exceptions) is that poststructuralism tends to be more abstract, more philosophical, and less political, than postmodernism' (Ritzer 1997).