Researching Children in Sport: Methodological Reflections

Abstract

The field of sport psychology has recently engaged scholars in a productive debate over ontological, epistemological, and methodological issues of research praxis (Giacobbi, Poczwardowski, & Hager, 2005; Krane & Baird, 2005; Ryba & Wright, 2005). With the intent to stimulate further methodological debates, this paper explores the possibility of developing clearer insight into the life-world of the child athlete by focusing on the utility of hermeneutic phenomenology. Phenomenology becomes hermeneutical when the transcendental theme of essences of human phenomena is replaced by the existential theme of understanding of what it feels like to be in the world (van Manen, 1997). Specifically an argument is made for the viability of phenomenological research with children and concrete suggestions are provided for conducting phenomenological interviews with young athletes. The paper is contextualized in the philosophy of existentialism and a phenomenological study of children's experience of enjoyment in figure skating.

Notes

It is important to note that in this citation, Piaget and Inhelder referred not to quantitative and qualitative methods of research but the complexity of children's cognitive development.

While seeking assent of a minor in addition to parental consent appears to be standard Institutional Review Board (i.e., ethics committee) procedure at many institutions, it is not a universal practice. Many thanks to the JASP Associate Editor for pointing this out.

The impetus to use a perceptual illusion in my discussion of the phenomenological view of experience comes from Howard Pollio's doctoral seminars on existential phenomenology.

I delimit this discussion to children who are at least 8 years of age.

I paraphrase the title of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's influential theoretical paper “Can the Subaltern Speak?” to signify complexity and multi-dimensionality of this question.

Wright (2002/2003) for example explained thick descriptions as narratives that “detail size, shapes, sounds, smells, colors, type of activity, verbal exchanges, etc. of a setting and activities that give the reader the vicarious experience of being in the setting as things happen” (p. 8).

See Pollio, Henley, and Thompson (1997) and Thompson, Locander, and Pollio (1989) for the excellent discussion of the role of interpretive group in the analysis of data.

As defined by Denzin and Lincoln (2000), bricolage is a complex interpretive structure of interconnected representations. It is “like a quilt, a performance text, a sequence of representations connecting the parts to the whole” (p. 6).