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.