Unlike Dickens’s novel, this is not a tale of light and darkness, order and chaos, good and evil… It is, though, a story worth to be told about two standpoints about games and sports, teaching and research, physical education simply put, that have pursued similar interests on parallel tracks for too long, despite their apparent closeness and expected shared cultural grounds. The objective of this conceptual analysis is to try and reconcile two perspectives, namely motor praxeology and teaching games for (...) understanding (TGfU), born in the last third of the XX century in France and England with the intention to rethink the foundations of physical education (PE) and sports teaching. Pierre Parlebas, from the French side of the English Channel, claimed in 1967 that sports make part of PE, that team sports must be considered from a specific, sociomotor point of view, and that motor conducts (i.e. the significative organization of motor behaviour), not sports techniques, are the corner-stone of PE and sports coaching. In the early 1980s, from the English side of La Manche, Almond, Thorpe, and Bunker made a plea for a shift in the way to teach games (sporting collective duels mostly), deeply concerned by the negative impact of the traditional technics-centred approach on motivation, competence and attained level of the least able in school situations. Our conclusion is that TGfU, or game-based approaches to sports coaching and teaching, can take great advantage of the motor-praxeological rationale for three reasons: firstly, because concepts like understanding, game sense and action principles are operatively, semiotically linked to the reality of the playing process; secondly, because the inner structures of the games that constrain players and guide their motor conducts, permit to integrate games in the general system of sporting games, no matter their level of institutionalisation; finally, because the intervention practice is better thought of and more systematically developed upon the operational concepts of internal logic and expected practical effects of game playing. This time, Paris could be the place to go to in search of solutions, not the city to run away from in hope of consolation. (shrink)

Indirect observation is a recent concept in systematic observation. It largely involves analyzing textual material generated either indirectly from transcriptions of audio recordings of verbal behavior in natural settings (e.g., conversation, group discussions) or directly from narratives (e.g., letters of complaint, tweets, forum posts). It may also feature seemingly unobtrusive objects that can provide relevant insights into daily routines. All these materials constitute an extremely rich source of information for studying everyday life, and they are continuously growing with the burgeoning (...) of new technologies for data recording, dissemination, and storage. Narratives are an excellent vehicle for studying everyday life, and quantitization is proposed as a means of integrating qualitative and quantitative elements. However, this analysis requires a structured system that enables researchers to analyze varying forms and sources of information objectively. In this paper, we present a methodological framework detailing the steps and decisions required to quantitatively analyze a set of data that was originally qualitative. We provide guidelines on study dimensions, text segmentation criteria, ad hoc observation instruments, data quality controls, and coding and preparation of text for quantitative analysis. The quality control stage is essential to ensure that the code matrices generated from the qualitative data are reliable. We provide examples of how an indirect observation study can produce data for quantitative analysis and also describe the different software tools available for the various stages of the process. The proposed method is framed within a specific mixed methods approach that involves collecting qualitative data and subsequently transforming these into matrices of codes (not frequencies) for quantitative analysis to detect underlying structures and behavioral patterns. The data collection and quality control procedures fully meet the requirement of flexibility and provide new perspectives on data integration in the study of biopsychosocial aspects in everyday contexts. (shrink)