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European Federation Of Sport Psychology Conference 2007: View of a Delegate

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European Federation Of Sport Psychology Conference 2007 Review 

Last week I attended the aforementioned conference and thought that it may be of interest to Istadia members and guests to hear a review of the conference.  All to often I am sent conference invitations that incur a significant cost.  I almost always decline as I am not sure of the benefits of attendance.
 

As an applied sport psychologist I must confess that I was slightly worried that I would have to sit through large number of presentations that were packed with statistics that, a) I wouldn’t understand (the stats not the overall messages) and, b) Did not really add anything to the applied field.  I did sit though a few of these presentations and on a few occasions asked the inevitable question ‘what are the implications of your research to the applied field?’ to which one presenter responded ‘I am not really sure’.  I chose not to push this point further.
 

The benefits to me as an applied practitioner were that these times were very limited and there was very often things happening that were directly relevant to me and made me think about dealing with clients and developing as a sport psychologist in ways that I had not thought of before.  I also met and hope to stay in touch with a number of European Sport Psychologists that have a slightly different take on sport psychology which I consider could be very useful to me personally in developing in my chosen career.
 

With so many topics on offer it was almost inevitable that sport psychologists regardless of their theoretical persuasion or whether they consider themselves applied or research sport psychologists would find something that was of interest to them and would benefit from a conference like this.  I have every intention of attending the next conference in 2011.
 

At the request of one of the founders of Istadia I add to the end of this post the abstract to a presentation that I gave at the conference.  At the end of the presentation I said that my personal learning from the intervention was that perhaps we as sport psychologists should focus applied research on ways and means of developing relationships before beginning with athletes so that any intervention is well received rather than focussing on techniques that will enhance performance whilst in.  My rationale for this was that all to often sport psychologists find themselves in situations where athletes refuse to take interventions seriously and my suggestion would be that it is difficult to be effective when this is the case.  I would genuinely welcome any feedback! 

James Beale
 


Paper 3. Evaluation of an inter-disciplinary sports science intervention (SSI) to the Great Britain under 16 korfball team preparing for the Youth World Cup (YWC) 

Beale, J.T.*, Johnstone, J., & Williamson, A

*University of East London 

Korfball is a mixed gender invasion game with the objective to score points through shooting a ball into afree standing basket. This paper aims to gain a qualitative appreciation of the recipients’ perspective of aninter-disciplinary SSI. The evaluation is a qualitative assessment after a proposition by Biddle et al (2001)that more diverse methods such as qualitative research is required within the sports science domain. The 3month SSI provided evidence based support to enhance performance through utilising the areas of psychology,nutrition and physiology. The SSI, adapting methods from Halliwell et al, (2003) worked with the squad 8 timesover the time period to achieve the objective in the lead up to and during the YWC. Post YWC InterpretivePhenomenological Analysis (IPA) (Smith, 1997) was conducted on a representative sample (n = 4) of the squad.Interviews were transcribed and analysed independently by 2 of the authors before coming to agreement onthe themes, clusters and master themes. IPA analysis identified 2 master themes, empowerment and improvedperformance. Master themes were identified through 9 clusters. Empowerment master themes were derivedfrom, education, learning, knowledge and engagement clusters. Improved performance were derived from,coach reinforcement, outcomes, coach endorsement, general effectiveness and effectiveness. Results from theIPA suggest that the intervention had a direct positive impact on performance over the intervention period,thus suggesting this form of analysis can be applied to assess an inter-disciplinary SSI. Further qualitativeresearch on the recipients of such interventions is necessary to gain a wider appreciation of athletes andcoaches perceptions of SSIs.

Comments

Thanks for the comments Keith. I thought about your post and I suppose one of the noticable differences was a more holistic approach, by that I mean that they were very prepared to look at wider issues than I had thought of to overcome situations. We spoke through several scenarios and things like the difference between working in academy and senior team and how to handle that came up. I noticed from our discussions that we were nearly always talking about structure and very very rarely talking about techniques. Many of the conversations that I have had in this country discuss the relative merits of techniques where as these guys were talking about the structure first. It was noticable that the 2 that I have in mind were considerably more experienced than I, both of which having over 20 years direct experience in applied sport psychology.
Posted by TotalPerformance | September 13, 2007 at 11:54 AM
Very interesting review. Could you expand on the different take by some of the other sport psychologists you met? You can still edit this using edit!
Posted by keithirving | September 13, 2007 at 10:50 AM
Thanks James - it's great to be able to share perspective that we wouldn't otherwise have. I think I share your views on approaches to sport psych. Maybe you caught my blog post from a while back? http://www.istadia.com/blog/robrobson/96
Posted by robrobson | September 13, 2007 at 1:17 PM
Thanks Rob - I did read your blog and yeap I think that we are in agreement. What do you think about the idea of researching the pre-requisites to effective sport psychology? Everything I have seen on the topic has been very basic. Pretty much saying that everyone needs to buy into the process to make it work. Are you aware (or anyone else reading this) of anything that looks at how to get the coach/player/parent/manager/performance director to buy into the process. I would be interested to hear about others anecdotal reports (good and bad) and any research that has addressed this. Enjoy your weekend JB
Posted by TotalPerformance | September 15, 2007 at 2:32 AM
Not really, but I'm sure it is a big issue. It comes down to things like stakeholder management, I guess, which would be taken for granted in business consulting but maybe less so in sport psych.
Posted by robrobson | September 20, 2007 at 9:06 AM

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