High performance school-age athletes at Australian schools: A study of conflicting demands

Résumé 0

Project Summary: The purpose of the original substantive study was to enhance understandings of the way that high-performance school-age athletes deal with their situations and predicaments. This study explored the competing demands on young people who are both high performance athletes yet are still at school. The research question thus focused on two aspects: first, how these young people cope with their dual lives, and second, what are the models of schooling that may best support them in their endeavours. Using 39 in-depth interviews and document analysis the researcher sought to give primacy to these young peoples’ views and to develop the notion of their so-called “conflicting demands” concerning combining study and sport commitments. The project was completed in the form of a doctoral dissertation in the field of Education. The participants included 19 athletes (former and current), 10 parents and 10 teachers. Participants were selected from across Australia, according to school types and the level of high performance sport. For this study it was at the National, World and Olympic level of competition. The original set of interviews was later re-purposed for a separate, pedagogical project. Namely, the researcher adapted several of the analytical steps she used as part of her dissertation work in the qualitative data analysis tools NVivo ™ to produce training materials outlining a helpful approach to using the software for analysis in four distinct stages: descriptive, topical, analytic and the drawing of conclusions. Additionally, from the actual research items such as journals, social media, newspapers, blogs that the researcher used in developing her literature review thematic analysis , a teaching Endnote file has also been developed that contains 21 items. Both substantive outputs based on the initial data collection, and subsequent training materials – especially in the ebook called The NVivo Toolkit – are listed as “Related Publications” and Endnote sample for this deposit. This has now been further developed into a website, ebook, Youtube channel and publication that outlines a N7+1 pedagogical digital learning framework for literature and systematic reviews that is now being taught using a ‘flipped classroom’ approach. Unlike the traditional singular-problem approach in related literature, the approach in this study was to integrate the problems that a school-age high performance athlete may encounter when combing dual endeavours of sport and study. Time may be the over-riding problem for these athletes because so many of their demands impact on the limited number of hours in a day, but fatigue, both physical and psychological, resulting from training and competition demands may temper an athlete’s motivation to engage in a high level of academic undertaking as well. Additionally, intense psychological and physical demands were associated with drug and alcohol abuse leading to depression and anxiety. Female athletes indicated being bullied, but not one of the male participants mentioned this issue. Additionally, the question of ‘Are you being bullied?’ was never asked, only the female athletes spoke of this problematic issue. The parents’ perspectives suggested home issues of sibling rivalry, disruption and separation of family life. Teachers’ perspectives centered on empathy for such students and the concern of guiding them into education that would provide short- and long-term benefits, e.g. career transitions after sport. The outcome of the study was to develop characteristics of schooling that may help these individuals to cope better in their demanding lives. An ‘athlete-friendly’ approach is proposed that has its primary focus in developmental pastoral care. This approach embellishes the notion of the child being able to flourish with this pastoral element of the school, with personalised learning to meet the individual needs of the student athletes. Young people attempting to combine dual endeavours of sport and study need resilience and this can be provided to them by their pillars of strengths – parents, teachers and coaches. Data Abstract: All interviews were originally audio-recorded and then transcribed verbatim. A Livescribe pen was used to record and then converted to .mp4 for transcription in NVivo™. Observations were noted about each participant only during the interview. For the purposes of sharing the underlying data, all transcripts have been anonymized using pseudonyms, used throughout the text and as part of the files naming convention. Additionally, a letter code preceding the pseudonym in the file titles stands for A (athlete), P (parent), T (teacher). In the few cases where an interviewee had two or three of these designations, the primary category was selected (ex: a parent who was also a former athlete was labeled "P", while a teacher who happened to also be a parent of one of the students, was labeled as "T"). Pattern codes which were converted from excel sheets are included to demonstrate the thematic pattern coding for the group known as athletes. Additionally, there are two examples of individual word queries in NVivo, including the word tags “bullying”, as well as “tired and sore”. As individual word queries, these depict pieces of conversational analysis. A document depicting word frequency query is also present, as an example of cluster analysis outputs that can be created in NVivo, which serves to visualize a number of themes across all interviews. Finally, there is an example of a manually abstracted transcript, as an image. This document provides an example of how to interrogate data prior to their input in NVivo software. The hand-written notes on the left list concerns about tensions and feelings. The notes on the right indicate broad initial themes that the researcher identified. With that, this process reflects a first step in providing greater transparency to the study prior to the second step of aggregating and entering it into the software.