Following twenty months of fieldwork, I spent fifteen months analysing my data. I conducted this analysis manually (rather than by using software) as a means to thoroughly categorise, explore and code the intricate details of the themes, recurring patterns and outliers I was able to identify. This process was iterative and comprehensive, albeit laborious, as it involved turning analogue (hard copy) data – such as hundreds of pages of handwritten fieldnotes, sixty surveys and census forms and hundreds of hours of audio files of dictated notes and interview recordings – into digital (soft copy) coded word processed documents. Manually analysing my data in this way stimulated a deep familiarity with its detailed content. This helped with investigating it thematically as well as enabling me to code the data in accordance with a range of categories (including activities, events, behaviours, emotions, norms, social roles/ professional positions/ interactions and public/ private contexts) in which themes arose.
My data analysis built on an amalgamation of themes: some a priori coded themes assembled from previous reading and preparation for the fieldwork, and some themes that arose from grounded coding during my fieldwork (whereby the themes emerged organically during the data collection and data analysis). The a priori themes were drawn from a wide range of social science literature and theory relating to elite sport (Roderick 2006; Howe 2004), elite athletes (McMahon and Penney 2011) and institutions (Foucault 1991; Goffman 1968; Scott 2010). A priori themes were also drawn across different disciplines, including sports medicine (Halson and Jeukendrup 2004), sports science (Australian Sports Commission 2014), sports nutrition (Burke and Australian
Institute of Sport Department of Sports Nutrition 1999), sports psychology (Australian Sports Commission 2013), and sports coaching literature (Denison 2007); elite athlete biographies and autobiographies (Thing and Ronglan 2015); as well as sporting ethnographies (Allen-Collinson and Hockey 2008; Wacquant 2004; Brownell 1995) and social science qualitative research method texts (Spradley 1980; Silverman 2010).
In addition to literature, preceding my fieldwork I obtained clearance to conduct my research from the AIS ethics committee and this experience informed some of the a priori themes I pursued going into my fieldwork and the data analysis afterwards. Likewise, media coverage of sport in Australia (including television coverage, newspaper articles, websites, blogs, radio programmes) and popular culture depictions (including advertisements, documentaries and films) of elite sport and elite athletes also informed the data I gathered, how I organised it and the high level themes I initially used to examine and code the data and to set the first foundations from which comparisons were made. Some of the a priori themes that guided my data collection and analysis included: discipline, surveillance, power, health, performance, wellbeing, pleasure, pain, perfection, beauty, biomedical discourses, physical training, idealised body images, fame, wealth, celebrity, talent, genetics and natural ability.
My use of identified a priori themes provided an organising framework during the initial stages of my fieldwork, a means to explore the data in more detail during data analysis and a point of comparison to test the themes of my newly discovered data from the AIS against existing literature. Once I began collecting data it was evident that some of the a priori themes I expected to be useful or relevant in the field were misleading, inappropriate or redundant. Although many of the themes did provide a base from which to frame my examination of the AIS,
the a priori themes were especially fruitful in creating a foundation from which to critique, contrast and diverge into new territory by gathering data located in original themes and across newly discovered codes and perspectives. Thus, during my fieldwork and especially during data analysis I created new organising categories and both high level and fine grained themes to code the nuances and subtleties of difference my original data depicted. Some of the themes reflected in my grounded data coding included: morality, elite athlete ethics, elite athlete attitude, elite athlete subjectivity, laziness, emotion (for instance, poise, selfishness, unselfishness, shame, confidence, pride and aggression), working- out, bodily awareness, embodied knowledge, training embodiment, feel and flow. My use of manual data analysis to test themes within my data, and against a priori themes in the literature, readily lent itself to data triangulation as a method of analysing my data. I used two methods of data triangulation. Firstly, I compared themes in the data collected from different methods of data collection (including data gathered in interviews, surveys, census forms, ATS data, AIS promotional paraphernalia and AIS published resources and participant observation recordings in various formats including: video recordings, audio recordings, handwritten and typed up fieldnotes and reflections). Secondly, I triangulated data in relation to participants’ perspectives (for instance, comparing the perspectives of athletes, coaches, teammates, service providers, where possible athletes’ family or friends, and my own observations). I was interested in comparing participants’ perspectives regarding recurring patterns of themes, metaphors, emic expressions with general participants’ observations, experiences and understandings of events, values, norms and actions and answers to interview/survey/conversation questions. These two methods of data triangulation enabled me to examine and test not only how my data mapped onto
existing landscapes within the literature, but also to extend the current maps in the literature to previously unknown landscapes and reveal the extent of my discoveries.
In the final six months of my fieldwork I observed that my data collection appeared to be reaching data saturation as the themes recorded in my fieldnotes remained constant. I chose to continue my fieldwork over the final months to observe particular significant events (including important competitions, changes in coaching personnel and the introduction of some new athletes) to test, and in turn have validated, the repetition of experiences and recurrence of themes in new and different contexts. In analysing my data a hierarchy of themes emerged as well as a narrative logic to express important themes within my thesis. The most significant themes, the most illustrative examples and, most importantly, the rich new landscapes in the field that were discovered through my data, inform the narrative that this thesis presents.
Chapter Three: Physical
Training
It is no surprise that one of the most important elements of athletes’ training is the physical training of the body. However the complexity of physical training and the multiplicity of ways athletes are physically trained is less obvious than most sports spectators assume. My research shows that physical training involves two interwoven elements. One element involves adapting athletes’ physiology – as well as their social values and mores around their own physiological performance – through physical sporting activity. The second element involves the training of athletes’ embodiment (including movement, posture, gait and breath) through Mauss’s (1973) ‘techniques of the body’. In combination these training elements are significant in reconstituting athletes’ habituses as elite, and producing “practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies” (Foucault 1991, 138).
The beginning of this chapter examines physiology adaption, and the cultural mores of elite athletes’ physiologically performing bodies. In this discussion I differentiate between the physical sporting activity that athletes perform, which I refer to as training, and the physical sporting activity of people participating in exercise, which I refer to as ‘working-out’. The remainder of the chapter investigates the second element of physical training: embodiment transformation.