This is finals week at my home university and the week before summer trimester begins at Nova (my second home? my home away from home?). I have a moderately large pile of papers to grade during the next several days. This week is actually better than most prior finals weeks for me - I gave my exams Monday and Tuesday, while, in the past, my exams were often scheduled on Friday - with grades due in the following Monday. I have about half of each exam graded and around 4 days to finish. There is not really any progress to report on my dissertation work but a couple of things are in the works this week. I should have some updates on that project no later than next week, and, hopefully, have regular updates after that. I do plan to post another 'monster' post soone. I have some other monsters that are going to play a role in my dissertation updates. I hope to clean up a couple of other projects during the next month (by 'clean up,' I mean finish papers and send them where they need to go) but am just getting started on another new thing during this time when one term is not quite finished but the next has not quite yet begun; the title of this post refers to this in between time. This project has to do with disability and inspiration. This is a collaboration with a former fellow student who now has a position as faculty at a research institution. I have offered some contributions in the past to some research conducted by my friend that dealt with consumer motivation and disability sport. This current project was inspired by my friend's interest in....inspiration. I am pleased to be able to apply my developing skills with qualitative inquiry to this research. Fortunately for me, the initial planning stages of this process are helped by content from a class I taught this semester - "Behavioral aspects of exercise." I included a unit about social and cultural factors, including disability, in my course outline. Some members of this class played wheelchair basketball (see prior posts) and I also ended up showing the film "Murderball" during a rainy class period when I had to postpone planned outside activities. Because of the upcoming research and the relevance of the issue to course content, I decided to include among my exam questions about "Murderball" the following: is disabled sport inspirational?
As an aside, there does not seem to be consensus about terminology when referring to disability/disabled sport, especially in comparison with other (standard? able-bodied? non-disabled?) sport. I am aware of the PFL conventions and teach this material in classes whenever possible, however, the wording of the question above does not reflect this approach. There is no easy solution to this because referring to the participants as persons with disabilities describes the participants and not the sport. I could have used a sport name ("Quad rugby") but wanted my students to also reflect on the BB experience. So that is why the question was worded in that way. Perhaps "is 'disability sport' inspirational" would have been better. Inclusion of this question did not constitute 'research' and I did not request/receive IRB; however I am doing a little personal content analysis of the responses to help me develop questions for the actual study. My initial thinking is that this an exploration of the phenomenology of inspiration (in the context of disability sport). But, increasingly, I see lots of things through the lens of phenomenology (or maybe I am only attracted to phenomenological questions?). To get the most out of the student responses, I decided to type them out (exams were handwritten). This will give me a mild simulation of transcribing. Since I know (most of) these students (there are almost 50), I can 'hear' some of them saying the things they said and this 'hearing in my head' part of the interview process has turned out to be important to me. (Think about reading and the voices we, or at least I, assign to characters we never actually hear.) I considered doing a sort of coding from the paper, but because I coded first with software, I do lean toward database thinking to organize. On the other hand, I may print the 2-3 pages I end up with (each student wrote anywhere from one sentence to a short paragraph). But I think the process of typing these out themselves may give me some themes from which to develop the interview guide. By the way, this is not an atheoretical approach; I lean toward social comparison (Festinger,1954, from a journal called "Human relations," is my original reference; Bandura also wrote on this in subject in "Social foundations of thought and action," [1986, Prentice Hall]); alternately,the PI in this instance directed me to status expectation theory which I was unfamiliar with. This project is going to provide participants with scenarios with various 'back stories.' I theorized based on social comparison that participants without disabilities might be most inspired by a person who had an acquired disability - because that is a more likely comparison (I actually think the most inspirational would be a person who overcame disability and returned to a 'without disability' state). However this issue is a lot more complex - and the PI has a done a lot of reading and some writing about what is known as the 'super crip' image, or the person with a disability who does things that are impressively exceptional, like Oscar Pistorious, although I think people have very mixed feelings about him at present. I know my class's responses are bias (we have spent the entire semester talking about why people don't exercise and I can already sense that background in some of the responses) but it may give me an interesting place to start.
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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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