IAT804 – Class Activity on Grounded Theory

Choose one of the following two research situations:

1) Ice Hockey Coaching

In team sports like ice hockey, coaches leverage their expertise and experience to provide analysis, feedback, and guidance for players to help them improve over time. Traditionally coaches have relied on verbal communication, physical demonstration, and simple diagrams; however, more recently, some have begun to capture and play back video recordings to provide their teams with visual feedback. Professional clubs have the resources to include video in their training and preparation routines, but many competitive amateur clubs lack the funding and resources to utilize video on a regular basis. Increasingly powerful, affordable, and portable display and camera technology (e.g. smartphones, GoPro) might help to address these problems and support new methods of teaching at all levels of hockey. In our research, we wanted to understand coaches’ current practices for communicating and teaching and explore their practices for using video feedback. We wanted to learn how current video feedback technology does or does not fit the teaching routines of coaches and how video feedback systems should be designed in the future to meet their needs. (Credit: Jason Procyk, SIAT MSc)

2) Incorporating Personal Experience into Design

The rationalist legacy of traditional HCI does not recognize the validity of using designers’ personal experiences in interaction design. Perhaps for this reason, little work has been carried out to investigate how designers’ personal experiences can contribute to technology design. Yet it’s undeniable that designers have applied their personal experiences into design practice and also benefited from such experiences. This thesis explores how interaction designers worked with their personal experiences and describes the circumstances under which designers’ personal experiences acted as valuable resources for interaction design practice. In this study, a designer’s personal experiences refer to the accumulation of his or her experiences that emerge from daily routines and interactions with design artifacts and systems whether digital or not in non-professional and personal contexts. (Credit: Xiao Zhang, SIAT MA)

As a small group, come up with a research design that focuses around either a Grounded Theory or Case Study methodology. Include descriptions of:

  1. Methodological Choice: why you think you should use a Grounded Theory or Case Study approach, and why you wouldn’t choose the alternative approach
  2. Research Questions: research questions that match the topic and chosen methodological approach
  3. Participants: who you will study and why (include numbers of people)
  4. Data Collection Forms: what types of data collection methods you will use and how long will use them for
  5. Data Analysis: how you will analyze your data
  6. Outcome: the outcome of the research
  7. Generalizability: how you may or may not try to generalize your findings and why

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