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The study of decision making and the underlying cognitive processes in sport is rapidly growing and therefore it is important that the most appropriate methodologies are used to investigate this area. The following chapter will present limitations associated with the data collection methods used to examine decision making in sport and puts forward an argument for the use of Think Aloud protocol analysis (Ericsson & Simon, 1993) for collecting in event decision making data.

A major issue when studying decision making in sport is that specific protocols to measure decision- making have often failed to reproduce representative performance conditions (Travassos et al, 2013). In addition, decision making in sport has a high degree of variability, especially in team sports, where the decision maker faces unpredictability from both, their team mates and opposition. Although studying decision making in a natural environment creates a high level of ecological validity. Ecologically more valid settings could, however, lack experimental control and lead to questionable cause-effect relationships (Marasso et al., 2014). Different types of data collection methods and their strength and weaknesses will be discussed further.

Delayed retrospective reports are among the most widely used approaches to gathering data on decision making in sport performance. With this type of data collection comes the assumption that individuals have access to their experiences and that their reports can accurately reflect the thought processes that occur during their real time performance. The majority of research has opted to use retrospective recall to gain insights into thoughts and actions that occur during performance. For example, Mulligan, McCracken and Hodges (2012) used retrospective interviews, prompted by video recordings, to investigate the decision quality in ice-hockey. They found that experts described decision-making situations as ‘familiar’ twice as often as non-experts.

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However, cued retrospective recall of events has a number of important limitations. One issue that has been shown to affect reporting accuracy is memory decay (Ericsson & Simon, 1980; Nicholls & Polman, 2008). In addition, retrospective reports are also distorted by knowledge about success of efforts to resolve stressful events (Brown & Harris, 1978). This can also be linked to the issue of bias as Bahrick, Hall and Berger (1996) found that recall of student’s high school grades was influenced by the attractiveness of the grade received. Researchers found that the grade A was recalled accurately 89% of the time but the grade D was only recalled 29% of the time.

Furthermore, research on memory has revealed that longer retention intervals result in lower recall accuracy. All types of memory uniformly and at predictable rates reduce accuracy unless the information is accessed and rehearsed during the delay (Bahrick, Hall, Goggin, Bahrick, & Berger, 1994). Tenenbaum and Elran (2003) examined the congruence between actual and retrospective reports for pre- and post-competition emotional states; these were studied separately and together. The results revealed that retrospective reports were not affected by the pre-post interference after a 72 hour delay. However, athletes underestimated the intensity of post competition unpleasant emotions. In addition, thoughts and feelings that were openly expressed after 72 hours were not fully congruent with thoughts and feelings reported in real time. Tenenbaum et al. (2002) also highlighted concerns of whether retrospective reports signify the athlete’s schematic knowledge of how they generally think before and after a competition. Retrospective measures might be tapping ‘a general schema’ or overlearned set of emotions rather than the particular emotions experienced before an event. Eccles (2012) argues that during retrospective reports participants might be aware of general strategies and recall and report strategies directly and without preference to specific behaviour they produced. Such reporting would be encouraged when researchers ask participants to recall general states.

Nisbett and Wilson (1977) argued that when participants are asked about their past experiences, they are often unaware of the causes of their behaviour and report inaccurate beliefs concerning the cognitive processes that led to their behaviours. In experts some information may not be accessible due to skills being overlearned and information may be implicit and as a result will not be verbalised. Research by Maier (1931) highlighted how participants can provide invalid reports about their

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thinking and cognitive processes. Furthermore, Nisbett and Wilson (1977) conducted a study where they provided participants a choice of four items of clothing and asked them to choose their favourite and provide reasoning behind their choice. Results showed that participants would choose an item of clothing mostly from the right side, rather than the left side by a factor of almost 4 to 1. All

participants provided reasoning for their choice but none reported that they were influenced by the position of the clothing. Based on these findings Nisbett and Wilson (1977) proposed that individuals have specific limits on access to the thoughts mediating their decisions and actions.

It has also been proposed that individuals create fundamental assumptions about how the world generally works (meta-cognitions) which are known as implicit theories (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). When an individual is asked to report on cognitive processing, they will report on the basis of the implicit causal theory that effectively matched the stimulus response conditions of the given situation (Eccles, 2012). Therefore, Eccles (2012, p.105) concluded (based on Nisbett and Wilson 1977, p.231) that maybe participants are asked to report “more that they can know”. Therefore, in this section, Ericsson and Simon’s protocol analysis method is presented, including their proposals for creating experimental conditions that maximise the validity of verbal reports.