Focus Statement and Study design Redux

After meeting with Dr. Harris last week, the recommendations are now in place for the rewrites of both the focus statement and study design.

The most significant change is going to be the transfer of five pages from my focus statement to the study design. Aptly enough, the section to be transferred will be the study design elements. After reading this sentence again, the move seems even more obvious and I am not sure why this wasn’t changed earlier. Anyhow, the elements of the study design will now be in the study design.

Another significant change will be in the number of observations and interviews. There will still be four coaches and two athletes from each team included in this study. However, for the sake of time and sanity, I will slightly scale back. Instead of interviewing each athlete twice for 30 minutes, the new plan is for one interview of 30-45 minutes, with the realistic expectation being 30. The athlete will be asked to bring the artifact to the interview or will be asked about it in a question formulated similar to, “If you could bring a memento or example of something from your team that shows cultural competence, what would you bring and why?”

Also, there will now be only one observation of each team instead of two. This will give me the opportunity to observe and interview on the same day, which will save a great deal of time.  Now, I will need to conduct and transcribe 16 interviews instead of 24. This should still allow for enough substance in the findings while avoiding possible repetition or saturation.

Today, I met one of our reference librarians, Mary Molineux, to help me obtain more materials which should help give more background detail to my cultural competence study, but specifically in dealing with high school coaches. There was one book on the library. I have just finished reading the chapter relating to coaches and have to figure out how to incorporate its findings. The writing is focused on the African-American athlete and includes qualitative data gathered from interviews which shows that the athlete feels special for being on the team, but also worries that grades are “given” to him by teachers who want to see him play. One concern of the African-American high school athlete is that academics are not being taken as seriously as they should. Recommendations are given to teachers, administrators and coaches. Perhaps I can use this to explain my topic, and perhaps even draw a few interview questions from this reading. Example – In terms of cultural competence, how often does your coach stress academics?  Another possible question - Is he concerned with your academic progress and how is this shown?

We also found two other materials which may be of great help to me and they have been ordered through ILL (Interlibrary Loan).