Contributing Factors to the Development of Shared Understanding within Football Teams
Description
Shared understanding is defined as two or more people thinking similarly in specific situations (Blickensderfer et al. 2010). Various factors have been stated to be crucial to the development of shared understanding within team sports like football, facilitating accurate prediction the actions and enabling an effective team performance. This research considered the perspectives of Scottish youth, amateur and junior male football players to outline contributing factors to the development of shared understanding within football teams. These perspectives were gathered through semi-structured interview approach, transcribed, and then analyzed through thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2019). Participants suggested that a combination of experience performing together, social cohesion and effective methods of communication were crucial for developing shared understanding between players which facilitates accurate prediction of actions, leading to a coordinated performance. These findings outline the importance of a combination of contributing factors to the development of shared understanding within football teams.
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Steps to reproduce
Purposeful sampling was used to recruit twelve male football players over the age of sixteen years old (Mage=21.83 +/- 6.34) from youth (n = 4), amateur (n = 6) and junior levels (n = 2) from the Tayside and Angus area in Scotland. The participant sample contained six defenders (Mage=23.5 +/- 8.38) and six attackers (Mage=20.17 +/- 3.37). Participants were invited to take part via email and those who were interested were asked to contact the researcher and were asked to provide written informed consent. Following this, interview locations and times were arranged. The overall purpose of the interviews was to establish common themes on what elements could contribute to the development of shared understanding between team members and if the participants thought this was crucial to developing an effective relationship within their team member(s). To achieve this, the interview schedule included three different sections. The first section asked participants to outline demographic information, including their football experience, their position and level of performance. The second section centered on participants’ relationship within their current team member(s) and how they thought this had developed over time (e.g., Can you tell me what it was like when you first started training with that player(s)? How do you see this developing in the future?). The third section focused on participants sharing their perspectives of how shared mental models and shared understanding could influence performance and how these influenced the relationship within their team member(s) (e.g., How do you think players are able to coordinate their playing on the pitch? What do you think about the concept of a shared mental model?). Participant data were transcribed and then analyzed through a six-stage reflexive thematic analysis as outlined by Braun and Clarke (2019) to establish common themes.