Examining the categorical structure of the knowledge of expert ice hockey coaches: A prototype theory of category structure applied to qualitative analysis.

Abstract

A qualitative analysis methodology refined to account for prototypical as well as classical category structure was used in the analysis of interview transcripts from four expert ice hockey coaches. Coaches were interviewed about their knowledge about the process of coaching elite level athletes. The interviews were transcribed and broken down into meaning units following the process outlined by Cote et al., (1993). The meaning units were grouped together and similar meaning units were given the same content label. This process reflected the belief that knowledge was organized in the middle of a hierarchy from general to specific (Lakoff, 1987). Considering prototyping effects in category structure, each of the 64 content labels was compared to each other, and a similarity rating on a seven point scale was assigned by the researcher. Category structures were generated from four non-hierarchical cluster analyses performed on the matrix of similarity judgements between the 64 resulting content labels. The relationships both within and between the categories were examined through an investigation of the distance to cluster center provided by the cluster analysis. These relationships provided insight into the structure, if not the content, of the categories that emerged from the data. The utility of this methodology as a preliminary step towards identifying the categorical structure of the data at hand, and the effect of both basic level categorization of knowledge and prototype effects in categorization were discussed.