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Asked by heartofnewcastle to Stu, Martin, Mark, Jenni, Helen on 22 Jun 2011.
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Mark Burnley answered on 21 Jun 2011:
The type of data I have collected during my work includes:
Breath-by-breath pulmonary gas exchange using mass spectrometry or (usually) rapidly responding O2 and CO2 analysers with a turbine or flow sensor for ventilation – this gives data for oxygen uptake, carbon dioxide output lung volumes and ventilatory volumes, and much else.
Blood parameters: lactate and glucose, haemoglobin and haematocrit (% of red cells) (from finger tip), pH, venous O2 and CO2 tensions, bicarbonate concentration (from venous blood samples).
Heart rate from the elctrocardiogram or heart rate monitors.
Power output from cycle ergometers, torque measures from dynamometers (strength measuring equipment), force from load cells attached to the leg.
Electromyography (amount of electricity produced by the muscle) measured from electrodes placed over the active muscles.
Muscle oxygen content from near-infrared spectroscopy.
Muscle temperature and pH measured from probes put into the muscle, core temperature measured from the rectum.
And (finally)… muscle metabolites from magnetic resonance measurements in a whole body scanner.
…are the data I have collected so far. 🙂
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Helen O'Connor answered on 22 Jun 2011:
I collect both qualitative and quantitative data. In sport psychology it is more common now to use a mixture of both methods, as this gives as a much more complete idea of what athletes think and feel so that we can think of new ways to help their mental game and help others to be more active.
http://www.holah.karoo.net/quantitativequalitative.htmI collect qualitative data by interviewing athletes either in person or via skype, and recording our interviews, so that I can listen to them and look for patterns in what athletes say. I have used this method to collect data about professional athletes’ attitudes about performance enhancing drugs.
I collect quantitative data from several methods. I use questionnaires, some might only have 5 or 6 questions in them, others might have over 100 questions. I also collect data about actual performance or behaviour – for instance accuracy or speed of a serve in tennis, or weight loss or number of times per week someone goes to the gym. This gives me lots of numercial data which can be put into some software called SPSS and then I can run probability tests on it. The type of quantitative data I have collected includes:
– Whether imagery training can improve athletes’ imagery ability
– Whether walking 10,000 steps per day or more affects weight loss in obese teenagers
– Whether attitudes about exercise affect how much exercise someone does each week and whether making detailed plans to exercise (when, where, how long etc) will help people exercise more often than people who don’t make detailed plans to exercise
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