Methods for Measuring Breadth and Depth of Knowledge

In elite sport, the advantages demonstrated by expert performers over novices are sometimes due in part to their superior physical fitness or to their greater technical precision in executing specialist motor skills. However at the very highest levels, all competitors typically share extraordinary physical capacities and have supremely well-honed techniques. Among the extra factors which can differentiate between the best performers, psychological skills are paramount. These range from the capacities to cope under pressure and to bounce back from setbacks, to the knowledge of themselves, opponents, and the domain, which experts access and apply in performance. In the companion chapter on breadth and depth of knowledge in expert sport (see Chapter 11), we discussed the forms or kinds of knowledge deployed by elite athletes, and described some lines of research which seek to tap and study such expert knowledge (McPherson & MacMahon, 2008; McRobert, Ward, Eccles & Williams, 2011). In this chapter we focus more directly on questions about methods for measuring or more accurately assessing expert knowledge, in particular addressing a wider range of methods to help us understand what experts know. Suggesting that sport researchers can productively adopt and adapt existing qualitative methodologies for integration with more standard quantitative methods, we introduce and survey a number of areas of qualitative research in psychology

Validity As Bindingness: The Normativity of Legality

I shall argue that the concept of (valid) law is a purely normative notion, irreducible to any factual description. This uncontroversial notion, which is shared by all approaching the law from the internal point of view, needs to be distinguished from the competing theories on the grounds of legal bindingness, namely, on the reasons for qualifying a norm as legally valid. I shall consider some implications of this distinction for legal reasoning and for the role of the jurist