Qualitative Research on the QUWS Team!

Qualitative research is done through observation, focus groups, and interviews, but this week in class we focused mainly on observation.  Most of the time, people don't even know they are a part of a study and that's the case with the QU Women's Soccer team.

One of our assistant coaches works at Yale and he conducts many different methods of research whether it is surveying us to see how healthy we eat and if that effects our play, or observing how many times in a game a specific player wins a head ball or their passing rate throughout the game.

For the first few games of the season, non of the players knew we were being observed until he mentioned it.  The whole purpose was to look at your own percentages and see if by being aware of it, can you improve as a player.

Another form of observation we practice is actually watching all 90 minutes of our games.  This improves our play drastically because we can actually see what we're doing wrong and improve it in practice.

Observation, however, cannot solely depended on for consistent research results.  Many different methods of Qualitative research must be present in order to have these reliable results.

The Social Network

So I recently saw the new movie Social Network, which is the story of how facebook came to be.  This week in my blog, I decided to focus on social media because it is so prominent in all of our lives.

Francesca's last blog focused on the unobtrusive research methods we talked about in our previous classes and related it back to social media.  Statistics show that over 500 million people check their Facebook to see what there friends are doing for more than 700 billion minutes per month.  Whether they know it or not though, they are all conducting unobtrusive research by "keeping tabs" on their friends, as Francesca mentions in her blog.  Personally, I spend a lot of time on Facebook and never realized that I was doing "research."

The second blog I wanted to focus on was Katie Warner's because she took social media to the next level.  She blogged that it is essential for non-profit organizations to invest time in creating a Facebook page and even money for advertising.  She states that, "with 39 million people using Facebook multiple times a day, it is easy to put a message out there and get more views than you would have on a standard website dedicated to the organization."  She also agrees that facebook is an example of unobtrusive research, even though many don't even realize they are conducting it.  Now Facebook isn't the only social media outlet that organizations can use, but for now, it is the most popular and ensures the company will gain recognition.

One of the most important points about unobtrusive research methods is that results are immediate.  By using these social media sites, companies can keep track of clients, employees, and volunteers.  The possibilites are countless!

QUWS!

This week I decided to focus on unobtrusive research methods and how it relates to the QU Women's Soccer program.  Unobtrusive research is done mainly by observation and the subjects don't necessarily know they are being measured.

On Facebook, we have a QU Women's Soccer page, so I decided to use this as means to conduct my own study.  As a team, we created a page to remind friends and fans what time and when our games are and before every game, we invite them via Facebook.  So I tracked how many people said they were attending our Friday games compared to Sunday games to see which day would get more fans.  I was surprised to find that more people would attend Friday games because there are classes throughout the day.

I also came across a book online that goes more into detail about observation.  It gave me an idea, so I applied it to the films of our game.  After each game, we look at film ranging from goals scored and goals against to mistakes and positive aspects of the game.  I noted how going over negative film footage of players actually affects them (as in how they react to the negativity and so on).  Every time my coach would point something negative out, I noticed the same girls getting upset and in some cases challenging his opinion.  At the end of each film footage, the attitude of these girls was always negative.  So before each film from now on, I've noticed that the attitude of these girls start out negative because they automatically assume the game footage will point out their mistakes.

From my research, I've noticed little things that even our coaches have looked over.  From this simple research, I can talk to my coach about trying to stay more positive to see how it will change the player's attitude.  It could also help us get more fans to our games.