A Failure of Imagination: How and Why People Respond Differently to Human and Computer Team-Mates

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Dance and Sport

The purpose of this research is to investigate dance and sport as two individual yet intertwining fields. Areas of inquiry include the artistic/aesthetic sports of the Olympic Games particularly rhythmic gymnastics, synchronized swimming, and ice dancing; the artistry and athleticism of cheerleading, dance team, and dancesport; the athleticism in dance companies such as STREB, Pilobolus, Bandaloop, and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre; and the athleticism in the dance training system of Lester Horton. Similarities in corporeal and intellectual practices of athletes and dancers are also explored as they manifest in cross-training, somatics, dance and sports medicine, higher education, and collaboration. The culmination of my research is the creation of Sound Mind Sound Body, a choreographic work bringing a team of dancers together to collaborate and train as athletes as well as performing artists

The Advocate, Vol. 13, No. 2, 1982

https://dc.suffolk.edu/ad-mag/1040/thumbnail.jp

An investigation into rugby union players' knowledge and understanding of concussion

Concussion amongst rugby union players’ is one of the highest and most common injuries that has been happening in the modern game. However, recently, previous rugby players have come forward with the physical effect that concussion has had on them from their early playing days, reducing their quality of like with everlasting effects. This means the uncertainty of players knowledge and understanding was at large, and wondering whether if players did know this information, would they take encountering a concussion more seriously. Therefore, this research study aims to investigate current rugby union players’ knowledge and understanding of concussion. The sample size consisted of 62 participants, including both males and females from both a university and a club setting, to get a comparison on their current knowledge. This research used a mixed methods approach by carrying out semi structured interviews and questionnaires to collect data. A process of coding a thematic analysis revealed key themes such as education players have had regarding concussion, what they believed were common signs and symptoms of concussion and their current knowledge to returning to play. The findings from this research indicated that males and females both from a university and a club setting had a large gap of knowledge regarding concussion including 62 responses in the questionnaires believed that headguards, mouth guards or shoulder pads prevent concussion. Other gaps included identifying incorrect signs and symptoms of concussion, such as neck pain, knocked out and ear discharge, as well as not having knowledge regarding the correct return to play protocol. There were also 4 participants who were unsure or did not believe players needed to be removed from play after sustaining a concussion. This study has shown the need to implement more concussion prevention strategies for both male and female’s players that can be disturbed to captains within a team as well as different settings such as club and university

Did You Take Care of Everybody? Insights on Crisis Management From Senior Student Affairs Professionals

This constructivist narrative study explored the experiences of five senior student affairs administrators who responded to an organizational crisis impacting their universities. Crisis management is a critical competency for higher education leaders (Peters, 2014) and involves the prevention, mitigation, and planning prior to a crisis; response and recovery during the crisis; and learning and changing following a crisis (Zdziarski, 2006). This study was guided by the research question: how do campus leaders at an institution of higher education (IHE) make meaning of a campus crisis event? Five participants, all of whom are senior student affairs professionals with extensive crisis management experience, shared their stories of responding to the death of a student or staff member on campus. Death is often unexpected and particularly challenging on college campuses, since college is often considered to be a safe environment characterized by tight-knit social communities (Cintrón, 2007). Using crystallization as an overarching framework for understanding, this researcher used narrative interviewing and reflective drawing to facilitate participants’ sharing of their crisis stories. Two distinct scholarly contributions emerged from this study, each employing divergent analytical approaches that were then represented as research manuscripts. The first manuscript, which used organizational frames as a theoretical framework to analyze participants’ stories, drew upon the narrative interview data to elicit the following themes: student affairs’ leaders’ interactions with families, impacts on student affairs leaders’ families, tensions between structure and intuition, adaptability as necessity, and applying lessons learned to organizational change. The second piece, in which the author created transcription poetry as an analytical strategy, situated poems derived from transcript data adjacent to narrative passages and the participants’ reflective drawings to create a tapestry of meaning. Following the presentation of this tapestry, the author reflected upon the methodological challenges that emerged during the research process, including how narrative interviewing opened the way for deep sharing of stories, the use of poemishness and dilemmas of poetic (re)presentation, dilemmas in generating participant-driven reflective images, and the author’s own process of meaning-making while wrestling with the topic of death. The findings in both articles make significant contributions to both the scholarly literature on crisis management in student affairs and higher education as well as the methodological literature on arts-based research, namely the use of transcription poetry and reflective drawing. Since crisis management is an essential competency for student affairs leaders, implications for student affairs graduate preparation and professional practice are discussed

Why do youth step out of sport and into court? A narrative-based exploration

Motivated by my son’s incarceration months after he stopped playing sport this thesis attempts to answer the questions that plagued me as I began dealing with lawyers, courts, and prison visits: If sport is all that it is supposed to be why is my son sitting in a prison cell? Had his fourteen years of playing sport been for nothing? Why hadn’t sport honoured its promise to protect my son from such a reality? Consequently, this thesis explores ‘Why youth step out of sport and into court?’ My objective is to provide parents and those interested in youth issues with new research that confirms, supplements, and/or challenges what is arguably ‘known’ about youth sports attrition and deviancy. However, rather than produce a traditional academic text I offer a polyvocal interpretive narrative text, where my own voice (as mother and academic) has been interwoven with the lived experiences and voices of five young men who had also ‘stepped out of sport and into court’ as well as the voices of published theorists and researchers who have broadened my understanding of the issues. As a result this thesis honours the lived experiences of the research participants as relayed to me during three semi-structured interviews, and is hopefully engaging enough to encourage you/the reader to think about the issues and to discuss them with others. The study highlights the complexities of sport and deviance, in that we live in a world of multiple realities. For instance, while many of the research participants had had similar experiences they had also come from different social, cultural and historical locations. Three of the participants had had two parents, two had had two parents living in different locations, and one had been raised by extended family. Three were raised in environments where gang ideology and drug use were normalised, while the other two had experienced environments to the contrary. One had been arrested on only two occasions, while the others had been arrested anywhere between five and thirty times before their nineteenth birthday, with charges ranging from painting on public property through to burglary and extreme violence. Their common experiences included their participation in rugby and/or rugby league; they had participated in sport and crime at the same time; they had been coached by intimidating people, and they had ‘stepped out of sport’ between thirteen and eighteen years old. The first take home message is that parents need to be diligent for the duration of their child’s sporting career and to be aware that whilst sports can do great things for young people, sport may also dampen a child’s sensitivity to fear and normalise and reinforce deviant beliefs, attitudes, justifications and orientations. The second take home message is that it is time for us to consider other forms of sport and physical activity and to give youth the power to define what sport means to them. Furthermore, if we agree that things need to change, this study recommends that attrition and deviance research be made more accessible and that the interested parties work together rather than independently

Young people’s use of video games as entertainment: Motivations and perceived implications, with a focus on the social aspects of video gaming.

Children’s motivation for video gaming (the activity of playing video games), and specifically their social motivation for playing, is a relatively new field of academic academic enquiry. Growing concern over adolescents’ and children’s use of video games, and the time they spend playing, has spawned research on the possibility of video ‘gaming disorder’ (Faust & Prochaska, 2018). ‘Gaming disorder’, which is included with the 11th revision of the ICD (International classification of diseases), is described as impaired control over (video) gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities and continued video gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences (World Health Organisation, 2018). Consequently, video gaming is an activity of recent interest and through this project I will aim to explore children and young people’s motivations for video gaming, how they are accessing/using video games, along with potential problematic use of video games within a population of young people in the South West of England. In order to understand young people’s experience of playing video games a mixed methods, two phase, research design was used. The first phase of this study employed the use of questionnaires incorporating an adapted version of the Internet Addiction Test (Young, 1998). The participants in Phase 1 were from a mixture of primary and secondary UK schools. These children were in school years 4/5 (8-10 years old) and years 8/9 (12-14 years old). Results from the adapted version of the questionnaire demonstrated that 16.8% of the 214 participants experienced a high level of video game preoccupation, and that male participants and primary school aged participants were more vulnerable to video game preoccupation. The data also revealed that just over a quarter of the participants typically played video games for at least three hours in one sitting, while just under half of the participants played video games at least once a day. Phase 2 of this research involved 27 participants who were involved in Phase 1. These participants took part in semi-structured interviews which were analysed using Braun and Clarke’s model of thematic analysis (2006). The participants’ responses revealed their perceptions on a range of, both positive and negative, impacts video gaming has upon their social interactions, their social opportunities, their learning, their mood and their overall wellbeing. This project adds to the growing body of research regarding young people’s uses and experiences of video gaming, and the social implications for young people who participate in the activity. This thesis concludes with an exploration of the limitations of this research, future directions for study and the implications for educational psychology practice

"Walking the fine line?" : Young people, sporting risk, health and embodied identities

sociological literature suggests that adult sports participation is occurring in a 'culture of risk' which glorifies pain, rationalises risk and promotes the practice of playing hurt (Messner, 1990; Nixon, 1992; Curry 1993; Pike, 2000; Roderick et aI, 2000, Safai, 2003; Howe, 2004; Young, 2004a; Liston et aI. 2006). Using this corpus of knowledge as a point of departure, this study directs attention towards young people's sporting risk encounters within the specific context of school sport. Guided by a process-sociological framework (Elias, 1978, 1991,2000 [1939]), it offers an insight into the ways in which young people interpret, experience and manage sporting risk and episodes of sporting pain and injury whilst at school. The research draws on data generated by 1,651 young people aged between ten and sixteen years old using a three-phase data collection programme. The programme incorporated self-report questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and group-based creative tasks and was conducted in six secondary schools located in "Churchill", a major English conurbation. The findings suggest that school sport worlds (re )produce two entwined, yet competing sets of beliefs, attitudes and practices related to sporting pain and injury and are best described as webs of risks and precaution and protectionism. Rather than adopting a more cautious approach to pain and injury the data indicates that this cluster of young people frequently play hurt, normalise injury and engage in forms of 'injury talk' that discredit episodes of sporting pain. In so doing, they may be placing their short and long-term physical, psychological, social and moral health in jeopardy. However, it is argued that this collection of sporting practices are highly valued by young people and are integral to the ways in which they assign and perform a range of dissecting and fluid embodied identities. Notwithstanding the potential for sporting risk encounters to engender damaging, disrupting and debilitating outcomes, the data also emphasises the potential for these experiences to act as important spaces in which young people are able to probe their bodily limits, develop corporeal knowledge and experience pleasurable emotions (Maguire, 199Ia). This thesis draws attention to the duality of sport and calls for a more reality-congruent approach to the sport-health-risk-youth nexus in the development of future (school) sport worlds