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