The recreation/sports leadership class at University of South Alabama spent some time yesterday playing with the kids at a Boys and Girls club location in Mobile, AL. I managed to get everyone in the same place for a few seconds to take this picture.
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I casually follow college football. Actually since I no longer own a television and the only thing I watch online regularly is football (The Ohio State Buckeyes), maybe it is a little more than casual. I have watched with some interest the various discussions as football continues to attempt to identify and implement some sort of play off system that takes into account the various conferences and level of play in each. No one, it seems, liked the former "BCS" system although it was in place for a lot longer than I realized. It sounded scientific and logical but it continued to make a lot of people unhappy.
Now we have the college football play off system which facilitates multiple games (2) since it is well known that nothing like the NCAA basketball playoff system could ever work for for football. And in an apparent rejection of the scientific and logical approach, we now have a 13 person 'seeding' panel. I just read an article today that described how the panel members regularly use the criteria 'controlling the game' - which sounds suspiciously to me like a focus on the 'quality' (how the game was played) rather than the quantity (how many points were scored; what was the spread) of the outcome. It is interesting to me, that given the level of mathematical and statistical sophistication that can be accomplished (quickly) on modern software that we are going back to what sounds to me an awful lot like a qualitative approach to assessment. I have used Dedoose (an online CAQDAS) on and off for a couple of years now, but I am finally going to make myself commit to completing an entire project in this program. Since I began to use a more open and inductive coding style, I have stuck with Word's track changes for first cycle coding. This is due to both the character length and number of codes I tend to create in the first cycle. I'm certain that most CAQDAS would work for second cycle coding - and this may end up being the way I use Dedoose - but I am going to give it a shot on first cycle coding, too. In keeping with the spirit in which I began this blog - as an outlet to describe my experiences learning and doing research - I will update as I work through this process. So far I have created a project in Dedoose (see above - "No Data Available") and am working on cleaning up the typed transcript files and reviewing with the audio recordings. I would always prefer to transcribe myself - even knowing how much time it takes - but this project has been going for some time so that part of the process is already done. One of the reasons I am using Dedoose is that I'm hoping to bring the rest of the team into this cloud-based project. Check this space for updates!
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AuthorI am Sheryl L. Chatfield, Ph.D, C.T.R.S. I am a member of the faculty in the College of Public Health at Kent State University. I also Co-coordinate the Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Research and I am a member of the Design Innovation Team at Kent State. Archives
February 2024
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