Peer Responses: Students are required to respond to at least two (2) other student’s initial postings (and the instructor) with significant comments that have substance. Peer responses are due no later than 11:55 p.m. ET on Sunday, Day 7 of each week. All peer responses must be substantial and significant and should be no less than 100 words in. If possible, one of the responses to another’s work should be from an opposing viewpoint. Your response to your peer’s work should be engaging and informative with good substance (just stating “I agree…” is not acceptable). Your responses should contribute in a meaningful way to helping advance our knowledge of the topics the class explores. Your responses to another’s work should be posted as a sub-thread to the student’s original posting of whom you are commenting.
Respond to Peer: 5A
Chav
The literature that I researched is the “Scientific production on indoor air quality environments used for physical exercise and sports practice: Bilbliometric analysis”, which is published through Journals of Environment Management.
The overall objective of the study was to investigate and analyze air production for indoor sport facilities on practice and physical exercise. This evaluation was conducted through bibliometrics (analyzing verified scientific evaluated sources) to create a substantial result. Ensuring that each scientific based reference was relevant and met the overall criteria. The criteria consisted of being a original article, had to focus on indoor air pollution and the affects of overall physical exercise and written in full text English. All other articles were excluded.
After the screening was complete, the results reveal only 1,281 articles, 39 were full text English as stated by the criteria, ultimately resulting in only 34 articles being used for the final results. Additionally, of the 34 articles it was further broken down that 21 of the 34 were air monitoring focused articles while the remaining articles focused on either air quality and or the affects on physical exercise.
The analysis concluded that even with only 34 included articles there’s a increase in research and analysis on the effects of air pollution and due to the various elements in the air that directly impact sports and physical exercise overall. I feel this method of this study is appropriate because it focused on analyzing air pollution and physical exercise through means of verified scientific evaluations previously conducted and limited the criteria to narrow it down to the exact topic. Finally, in adding my own opinion I do believe that limiting the number of articles due to the criteria does provide credibility but providing even a personal scientific evaluation of their own would have further qualified their evaluation and analysis.
Reference
Andrade, Alexandro. (2016). Scientific production on indoor air quality environments used for physical exercise and sports practice: Bilbliometric analysis. Journal of Environment Management 196 (2017) pg 188-200. ISBN: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2017.03.001
Jesss
The article that I chose for this forum is titled “The Health Effects of Exercising in Air Pollution.” This particular study summarizes the effects of exposure to pollution, particulate matter, ozone, and carbon monoxide, during physical activity. The article also made several suggestions on how to minimize the resulting adverse effects, in order to reap the benefits of exercise while avoiding the fallout as much as possible. The study looks at the proverbial risk versus reward, when it comes to exercising in air pollution. Obviously, exercise is good for one’s health, but when living in an area with severe pollution, there is an inherent risk associated with physical activity that is not prone in other areas.
The article concludes that when performing physical activity, the higher the pollution and the more strenuous the exercise, the higher the level of perceived exertion will be, compared to the areas with lower amounts of air pollution. This may also lead to impaired performance and air pollution-induced lung inflammation. By utilizing some of the suggested recommendations, athletes have been found to reduce the detrimental impact that air pollution has on one’s health.
Seeing as I currently live in an area that has high levels of air pollution, I personally agree with the article’s summary and conclusion. When working out on days when the smog is in evidence, the effort almost always feels twice as difficult than on days where the smog is not overtly obvious. The winter here is notorious for having an inversion, where the smog settles low to the ground, and the air pollution is almost always visible during that time frame. In the future, I may have to try some of the authors’ recommended counters to air pollution.
Reference
Giles, L. and Koehle, M. (2014). The health effects of exercising in air pollution. Sports Medicine Vol 44 pg 223-249. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy1.apus.edu/docview/1624971864?OpenUrlRefId=info:xri/sid:primo&accountid=8289
Respond to Peer
5B
JJ
A mixed methods study takes the combined efforts of quantitative research, which focuses primarily on data and statistics, and qualitative research, which is often open-ended and narrative-like.
As the title would suggest, “Students’ Motivation for Sport Activity and Participation in University Sports: A Mixed-Methods Study,” is a mixed methods study examining the various motivators that students have for playing University level sports. The intent of the study was to find ways to motivate students that were predominantly leading sedentary lifestyles to join some form of physical activity.
The study asked recruited participants to complete a quantitative survey that took approximately 30 minutes to complete. Once the survey data had been gathered, a separate group of participants were given qualitative, narrative-style interviews. These two portions of the study were then cross referenced and combined to form the mixed methods research results.
There are many studies where one style of research may be superior to another. I personally feel that mixed methods research is often the way to conduct a study, to fully form a picture and completely understand the nuances of the research.
Reference
Diehl, K., Fuchs, A., Hilger-Kolb, J., & Rathmann, K. (2018). Students’ motivation for sport activity and participation in university sports: A mixed-methods study. BioMed Research International Vol 2018. Retrieved from https://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2018/9524861/
Carsi
The article I chose to look at this week for my qualitative research is “challenges and motivators to physical activity faced by retired men when ageing: a qualitative study.” Just by reading the title, it is understood that this type of study will be qualitative.
A qualitative study is “multimethod in focus, involving an interpretive, naturalistic approach to its subject matter. This means that qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them.” (Bredland et al., 2018) The main goal of this method of research is to study the subjects in their natural setting to better understand and explain the “how” and “why” of the topic.
This study is qualitative, not just because of the title, but because it looked at the environment that these men live it and showed how the environment either encourages or hinders physical activity.
Reference:
Ebba Langum Bredland, Sylvia Söderström, & Kjersti Vik. (2018). Challenges and motivators to physical activity faced by retired men when ageing: a qualitative study. BMC Public Health, 18(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-018-5517-3
Gephart, Robert, and Rynes, Sara. “Qualitative Research and the Academy of Management Journal.” Academy of Management Journal 47.4 (2004): 454–462. Web.
What Is Qualitative Research and Why Is It Important?
Qualitative research is multimethod research that uses an interpretive, naturalistic approach to its subject matter (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994). Qualitative research emphasizes qualities of entities-the processes and meanings that occur naturally (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000: 8). Qualitative research often studies phenomena in the environments in which they naturally occur and uses social actors’ meanings to understand the phenomena (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994: 2). Qualitative research addresses questions about how social experience is created and given meaning and produces representations of the world that make the world visible (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000: 3). Beyond this, qualitative research is “particularly difficult to pin down” because of its “flexibility and emergent character” (Van Maanen, 1998: xi). Qualitative research is often designed at the same time it is being done; it requires “highly contextualized individual judgements” (Van Maanen, 1998: xi); morever, it is open to unanticipated events, and it offers holistic depictions of realities that cannot be reduced to a few variables.
Clarity can be gained by contrasting qualitative research with quantitative research that “emphasizes measurement and analysis of causal relations among variables” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000: 8). Although the two research genres overlap, qualitative research can be conceived of as inductive and interpretive (Van Maanen, 1998). It provides a narrative of people’s view(s) of reality and it relies on words and talk to create texts. Qualitative work is highly descriptive and often recounts who said what to whom as well as how, when, and why. An emphasis on situational details unfolding over time allows qualitative research to describe processes. Qualitative researchers also seek to explain research observations by providing well-substantiated conceptual insights that reveal how broad concepts and theories operate in particular cases. This approach is distinct from that of quantitative research using the hypothetical-deductive model that uncovers important relationships among variables and tests general propositions.
The distinction just drawn between qualitative and quantitative research overstates the differences between these overlapping genres. But it does call attention to two critical issues. First, qualitative research employs the meanings in use by societal members to explain how they directly experience everyday life realities. It builds social science constructs from members’ “concepts-in-use” and focuses on the socially constructed nature of reality (Schutz, 1973). Quantitative, positivist research, in contrast, imposes scientific meanings on members to explain a singular, presumed-to-be true reality that nonscientists may not appreciate. Second, qualitative research starts from and returns to words, talk, and texts as meaningful representations of concepts. Quantitative research codes, counts, and quantifies phenomena in its effort to meaningfully represent concepts. Qualitative research thus has an inherently literary and humanistic focus, whereas quantitative research is grounded in mathematical and statistical knowledge. An important value of qualitative research is description and understanding of the actual human interactions, meanings, and processes that constitute real-life organizational settings. The depiction and understanding of the meanings of organization members is important in itself (Nelkin & Brown, 1984) and is a task often neglected in organizational research. The domain of naturally occurring meanings is highly accessible to qualitative research and distant from quantitative research. An important issue is to balance the humanistic and literary aspects of qualitative research that focus on meanings with the demands for scientific knowledge based in mathematical or statistical reasoning.
A second important point is that qualitative research involves both data collection and data analysis. Both steps in the research process can be qualitative or quantitative. Many scholars consider the quantitative analysis of qualitative data to be qualitative research. But it can be argued that quantitative analysis of qualitative data requires data to be quantified, and hence this is quantitative research. My point is that management researchers face many mathematical, statistical, and measurement challenges when they apply quantitative or calculative techniques or perspectives to qualitative data. These challenges become obscured when research that uses quantitative tools of analysis is labeled qualitative research.
Qualitative research is important for management scholarship for many reasons. In brief, it provides insights that are difficult to produce with quantitative research. For example, qualitative research can provide thick, detailed descriptions of actual actions in real-life contexts that recover and preserve the actual meanings that actors ascribe to these actions and settings. Qualitative research can thus provide bases for understanding social processes that underlie management. Qualitative research can also provide memorable examples of important management issues and concepts that enrich the field. Finally, qualitative research has potential to rehumanize research and theory by highlighting the human interactions and meanings that underlie phenomena and relationships among variables that are often addressed in the field.
The Methodological Importance of Theory
The relationship between theory and methodology is important. Researchers need to use methodologies that are consistent with the assumptions and aims of the theoretical view being expressed. A simplified conception of three perspectives used in management research is presented in Table 1. Positivism and postpositivism adopt the stance of realism and rely on the assumption of an objective world external to the mind that is mirrored by scientific data and theories. Positivism and postpositivism are efforts to uncover truth or true reality. Postpositivism, the more recent view, differs from positivism in holding that reality can be known only probabilistically, and hence verification is not possible. Falsification, not verification, of hypotheses becomes the basic task of research. Well-developed postpositivist qualitative methods can uncover facts and compare facts to hypotheses or prior findings in an attempt to falsify prior hypotheses or to contradict previous knowledge.
A large proportion of the qualitative research I have reviewed for AMJ can be characterized as representing positivism and postpositivism. Many of these submissions seek to mirror quantitative research techniques. An important challenge for this qualitative research is to articulate rules or bases for deciding “associations” and for determining how results and findings fit with preliminary propositions or hypotheses. This is a challenge, since qualitative research lacks the explicit coefficients and criteria for evaluating and falsifying hypotheses that quantitative research has developed.
Perhaps because of this challenge, well-known qualitative methods from social science, such as grounded theorizing, have been used. Indeed, most authors making qualitative submissions claim to have used grounded theory processes, although references to grounded theory are more common than detailed application of grounded theory techniques. The problem is that grounded theory often does not fit well with the objectives of positivist or postpositivist qualitative research. The misfit occurs in part because, like many other qualitative techniques discussed below, grounded theory originated within the interpretive research tradition of social research (Van Maanen, 1998) and was designed to achieve interpretive research goals and insights concerning meanings, as noted below. This theoretical-methodological inconsistency may in part explain why many qualitative research submissions, particularly those in the positivist tradition, provide insights that are somewhat limited and at times superficial. It is difficult to provide strong and rigorous findings without well-developed criteria for evaluating hypotheses. And superficial findings seem likely if grounded theory is applied in ways that omit analysis of the differences in meanings across important social groups. Two exemplars of positivist research published in AMJ are McNamara and Bromiley’s (1997) study of decision making using qualitative and quantitative data, and Gersick’s (1989) discovery-oriented qualitative study of groups.
The focus of the interpretive perspective differs from the focus on variables and hypothesis falsification used in postpositivism. The goal of interpretive research is to understand the actual production of meanings and concepts used by social actors in real settings. A relativist stance is adopted such that diverse meanings are assumed to exist and to influence how people understand and respond to the objective world. Interpretive research thus describes how different meanings held by different persons or groups produce and sustain a sense of truth, particularly in the face of competing definitions of reality. And it inductively constructs social science concepts using concepts of social actors as the foundations for analytic induction. This concern with meanings and second-order concepts-the concepts of the concepts of social actors–leads to a focus on thick descriptions of members’ talk and nonverbal actions in specific settings. Rather than producing qualitative facts to evaluate hypotheses, interpretive researchers seek to describe and understand members’ meanings and the implications that divergent meanings hold for social interaction. Isabella’s (1990) award-winning paper stands as an excellent example of interpretive research published in AMJ.
Critical postmodernism combines critical theory and postmodern thought. Critical research describes the historical emergence of social structures and the contemporary contexts in which these structures form contradictions with implications for social action and human freedom. For example, critical research explores the presence and implications of the basic contradiction of advanced capitalism: the desire for profit exceeds the available profit. Contradictions are conceived to be basic to the exploitation that emerges when hegemonic worldviews conceal contradictions, leaving people unaware of tacit forms of domination and subjugation that are present. Critical research uncovers relations of dominance and subjugation and produces insights to make social actors reflexively aware of their own role in the reproduction of capitalist inequities. Critical research seeks to transform the social order and allow emancipation from unwanted structures of domination.