24 research outputs found
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IEC election satisfaction survey 2014
Commissioned by the Independent Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC), JuneThe Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) was commissioned by the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) to conduct a survey on the 2014 National and Provincial Elections. The 2014 elections, held on the 7th of May 2014, were the fifth national and provincial elections to be held in South Africa since 1994. The intention of the 2014 Election Satisfaction Survey (ESS) was to determine opinions and perceptions of both voters and election observers regarding the freeness and fairness of the electoral process. A further aim of the study was to assess the operational efficiency of the IEC in managing the 2014 local government elections. The study was conducted among two groups of respondents, namely (i) South Africans who voted in the 2014 Elections and (ii) local and international elections observers. The target population for the voter component of the study was individuals aged 18 years and older who were South African citizens, and who were eligible to vote in the 2014 national and provincial elections. The study also conducted interviews among local and international election observers visiting the selected voting stations on Election Day
Optimization of performance in top-level athletes: an action-focused coping approach
In their target article, Yuri Hanin and Muza Hanina outlined a novel multidisciplinary approach to performance optimisation for sport psychologists called the Identification-Control-Correction (ICC) programme. According to the authors, this empirically-verified,
psycho-pedagogical strategy is designed to improve the quality of coaching and consistency of performance in highly skilled athletes and involves a number of steps including: (i)identifying and increasing self-awareness of âoptimalâ and ânon-optimalâ movement patterns
for individual athletes; (ii) learning to deliberately control the process of task execution; and (iii), correcting habitual and random errors and managing radical changes of movement patterns. Although no specific examples were provided, the ICC programme has apparently
been successful in enhancing the performance of Olympic-level athletes.
In this commentary, we address what we consider to be some important issues arising from the target article. We specifically focus attention on the contentious topic of
optimization in neurobiological movement systems, the role of constraints in shaping emergent movement patterns and the functional role of movement variability in producing
stable performance outcomes. In our view, the target article and, indeed, the proposed ICC programme, would benefit from a dynamical systems theoretical backdrop rather than the cognitive scientific approach that appears to be advocated. Although Hanin and Hanina made reference to, and attempted to integrate, constructs typically associated with dynamical systems theoretical accounts of motor control and learning (e.g., Bernsteinâs problem,
movement variability, etc.), these ideas required more detailed elaboration, which we provide in this commentar