PES6252 Chap.9 What the Behaviour Evidence Actually Shows
What the Behaviour Evidence Actually Shows
Read every study twice
Everything before this chapter was about producing a record. This chapter is about what the records produced, and it is the material your literature review will lean on most.
Read it with the published criterion in view: you are asked to criticise the idea, methodology, results or conclusion of the papers you include, and the most reliable place to find that criticism is the gap between what a study measured and what it was taken to show.
Each finding below therefore comes with the sentence it supports and the sentence a careless citation would add.
Age changes behaviour, but age was not the cause
Twelve English youth professional soccer coaches were observed across six age groups with a modified computerised instrument.
With the youngest squads instruction dominated; with the older ones, questions admitting several answers rose, total feedback rose by a statistically significant margin, and punitive acts rose too, while the youngest groups spent more time in drill like activity and the oldest in game like activity. Taken alone that invites an obvious causal reading.
Interpretive interviews triangulated with the behavioural data removed it: how old the squad was turned out not to shape how these coaches thought, and what did shape it was what each of them believed coaching to be, what he had lived through before, and the pressure he felt from around him. The transferable point is the one to carry: on the counts alone the causal account would have come out wrong.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Reading a study twice: the finding, and what a citation would add
- 02
Behaviour by athlete age across six groups, and the obvious causal reading
- 03
What interviews showed instead: beliefs, experience and perceived pressure
- 04
Behaviour performed to establish credibility, and what counts cannot see
- 05
The best practice template as an assumption the literature has questioned
- 06
Data driven feedback against discretionary video review
Refuse one policy and propose a defensible one
- 3Name the inferential move the policy makes.
- 3Use the same research programme to show the target variable is wrong.
- 4Propose the alternative and attach its published conditions honestly.
Key terms
- Divergent Questioning
- Questioning that admits more than one defensible answer, reported as rising with athlete age and as rare in the general coaching profile.
- Triangulation
- Combining behavioural data with a second method such as interviews, which in this literature has twice overturned the causal reading the counts alone suggested.
- Perceived Pressure
- Pressure a coach experiences from administrators above and from athlete motivation below, found to predict the use of autonomy supportive behaviours.
What the Behaviour Evidence Actually Shows FAQ
What is the single most useful finding in this chapter for a review?
That on the counts alone the causal account would have come out wrong in the age study. It is useful because it generalises into a question you can ask of almost any observation paper: what would these authors have written with nothing but the tallies in front of them. In that study the counts were accurate and the inference from them was not, and only a second method separated the two.
A review that asks that question of its included papers is doing original critique rather than reporting.
Does feedback from observation actually change coaches?
Under stated conditions, yes, and the contrast in the study is what carries it. Three coaches received structured feedback built on analysis of their own behaviour, with video used in the discussion and target values agreed per dimension, and their change was maintained. A fourth was given his own videotapes and left to form his own recommendations, and only two dimensions moved.
Self observation is therefore not the active ingredient. The conditions attached are equally part of the result and are close to unfalsifiable, which is itself a criticism worth making.
Assessment move
Build a four column table of the studies in this chapter: sample, finding, limit, and the sentence you would actually write. The fourth column is the one that becomes your review, and writing it while the limit is still in view is what stops a summary sentence hardening into an overclaim three drafts later.
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