Sport And Exercise Psychology: A Critical Introduction

recall and recognition tasks, the “temporal occlusion” paradigm and eye-tracking
technology). Although we shall describe each of these techniques briefly below,
additional information on their strengths and weaknesses is available in Lavallee,
Kremer, Moran and Williams (2004), A.M.Williams et al. (1999) and A.M.Williams
(2002b).

In-depth interviews

Intensive interviews are widely used by researchers in an effort to elicit experts’
knowledge and opinions about different aspects of their sports. The advantages and
disadvantages of the interview method were mentioned briefly in Box 1.4 in Chapter 1.
Recently, Eccles, Walsh and Ingledew (2002) interviewed the British orienteering squad
(n=17) in an attempt to develop a “grounded theory” of how expert performers in this
sport manage to divide their attention successfully between three key sources of
information: the map, the environment and the travel path. Grounded theory is a
qualitative approach in psychology in which researchers build a conceptual model
inductively from the data yielded by participants rather than deductively from the
researcher’s assumptions about the phenomenon in question.

“Think aloud” verbal protocols and “thought sampling” techniques

As we learned in Chapter 1, interviews are limited as research tools because of their
reliance on people’s retrospective reconstructions of their past experiences—a procedure
which is known to be flawed (Brewer, Van Raalte, Linder and Van Ralte, 1991). An
alternative to this approach is the “think aloud” verbal protocol method whereby people
are required to talk about and/or give a running commentary on their thoughts and actions
as they tackle real or simulated problems in their specialist domain. This technique was
pioneered by de Groot (1965) in an effort to explore the cognitive processes of chess
masters as they contemplated their next move in a simulated game. It is a valuable tool as
it helps researchers to represent not only what people know (declarative knowledge) but
also how they perform skilled behaviour (procedural knowledge). Of course, there are
certain limitations associated with the collection and analysis of verbal protocols. First,
an editing problem arises from the sheer volume of data collected. Second, protocols are
limited to consciously accessible processes on the part of the person studied. Finally, a
difficulty arises from the fact that recording what people say as they solve a problem may
inadvertently distort the quality of the data obtained. Put simply, people may become
more self-conscious, guarded and/or spuriously rational if they know that their every
utterance is being analysed by a researcher. In spite of these limitations, verbal protocols
are useful because they are not vulnerable to the retrospective recall biases that afflict
interviews.
“Thought sampling” or “experience sampling” methods (based on Csikszentmihalyi,
1990; Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi, 2002) involve equipping athletes with electronic
beepers during training or competitive encounters and cueing them randomly to pay
attention to their thoughts and experiences at the precise moment in question. Thus
athletes are prompted electronically to respond to such questions as “What were you
thinking of just now?” Using this technique, researchers can keep track of athletes’

Sport and exercise psychology: A critical introduction 162