Since looking at your comments on my research questions, I think you are probably right about my questions being too narrow. I know there are books dealing with Djokovic’s mental strategies and his training as well as one book that I know he wrote but I think that is not enough so I’m slightly changing my research questions, using your advice and focusing just on professional tennis players. Because I wish to research mental health and how that impacts performance and being able to find a correlation between mental training and success in athletic competition, if I look at professional tennis players in general, I think I will be able to accomplish more than if I just focus on one.
- Does mental preparation and mental training such as meditation etc. help professional tennis players on the court?
- Does mental training correlate to more success on the court?
- What type of mental training do professional tennis players incorporate in their everyday life to help them become a better, more successful athlete?
To answer these questions, I still plan on using a mixed methodology approach, both qualitative and quantitative research. The methods I plan on using would be case studies, looking at particular professional tennis players within the top 100. Testing professional athletes and their results in relation to mental training. I plan on collecting mostly quantitative data but some qualitative data. Mostly, I will be seeing how mental training affects players records but there may be some qualitative data specifically taking players biographies to look at how they felt on the court after implementing mental training techniques. This require mostly quantitative analysis however I plan on using two more types of analysis, causal and exploratory. I will be implementing causal analysis, looking at the cause and effect of implementing mental training within professional tennis. As well, I will implement exploratory analysis which looks to find the relationship between two variables, in this case, results and the use of mental training in professional tennis.
Thinking about my unit of analysis which was to compare results with mental preparations taken by professional athletes and hope to find a correlation between mental preparation and results. As well, compare to college athletes to identify possible barriers that stand in the way of college athletes pursuing their professional aspirations. Seeing this change in results from athletes before and after implementing mental training techniques, can see the major impacts that mental strength and mental training can impact one’s performance.
My feedback is similar to that I provided to Renee: do you intend to conduct a new case study or studies, or to study the results of existing case studies? The answer will determine more specifically the methods you’ll need to employ. In other words, a case study is as much a methodological decision as a method, meaning your decision to conduct case studies means you’re not necessarily seeking to develop knowledge that can be generalized beyond the case study. If your methods are to analyze case studies, then you’ll need to determine how you intend to parse and analyze the data from those case study reports. Will you use thematic coding? Will you combine more traditional research methods (e.g., reviewing existing literature) to help you develop a coding schema for thematic coding? The approach you take to case studies will definitely require you to select different kinds of methods, so we should probably chat about that. You can do so by email or in this thread, but be sure to send me an email to let me know you’ve posted a response if you reply in this thread.