The Value of Social Validation in Single-Case Methods in Sport and Exercise Psychology

Social validation is used to determine satisfaction with an intervention and has been utilized in many single-case studies within sport and exercise psychology research and consultancy. This article reviews current social validation procedures and makes recommendations of how a more thorough consideration of the technique could add greater value to the understanding of single-case protocols within research and applied practice. Recommendations include using semi-structured interviews for data collection, using content analysis to analyze these data, reporting social validation results in a thorough manner, collecting social validation information from significant others, and collecting social validation data as frequently as possible.     

How Do Consumers Transfer Existing Knowledge? A Comparison of Analogy and Categorization Effects

The trend in recent consumer research has been to emphasize the similarities between analogy and categorization. In this investigation, we merge the literature on analogy, categorization, and structure mapping theory to reach a better understanding of their differences. In 3 experiments, we compare consumers’ responses to analogy and categorization cues and find that analogy places much greater constraints on knowledge transfer than categorization by focusing consumers on relational similarities. Illustrating this, the analogy group in Study 1 was just as likely as the categorization group to generate relational inferences, but much less likely to generate attribute inferences. Likewise, the results of Study 2 indicate that the analogy group restricted their processing of features lying outside the common relational system, leading to inferior recall relative to the categorization group. Building on these findings, Study 3 demonstrates that, under certain circumstances, analogy and categorization work together syn‐ergistically to enhance consumer memory.     

Reinforcement and Helping Behavior1

A study was conducted to determine the effects of reinforcement following helping in one situation on subsequent helping behavior. It was predicted that helping behavior would increase following positive reinforcement and decrease following negative reinforcement. It was also predicted that the attractiveness of the dispenser of reinforcement would affect subsequent helping. The study was conducted using a 3 × 2 × 2 design with the variables bemg nature of reinforcement, attractivcness of the confederate, and sex of S. The data indicated that subsequent to negative reinforcement, helping responses decrease. There were no differences between the positive, neutral or control conditions. Sex of S interacted with reinforcemcnt condition, with mcn helping more than women following negative reinforcement. Malcs and females also differcd in quality of help given, with men offering more physical help than women, particularly following neutral reinforcement.     

Community Research: The Lost Art of Unobtrusive Methods1

The use of unobtrusive methods, with special reference to community‐oriented research, is a lost art, despite their strong recommendation by Webb, Campbell, Schwartz, & Sechrest (1966) as means of supplementing reactive measures. The decline of unobtrusive measures seems to be related to the increased popularity and adherence to the doctrine of informed consent, the decrease in use of deception as a method, and the effort to conceptualize research subjects as cooperative participants. While the distaste for unobtrusive methods seems to reflect increased sensitivity toward ethics in research, the collection of partially reliable and partially valid knowledge continues, with considerable reliance on reactive measures.     

Job crafting for lean engagement: The interplay of day and job-level characteristics

The quality of working life under the production system known as lean manufacturing (LM) is a heavily debated topic. Little is known about the engagement level of employees under this system. Our study is concerned with how employees in this context craft their jobs to enhance their own engagement, and we specifically consider how daily skill utilization triggers this process. Using a cross-level perspective, we further consider whether job-level characteristics relevant to the lean context, namely task interdependence and boundary control, restrict or facilitate the effects of daily skill utilization. A daily diary study was conducted over 4 working days with 64 employees in a large company utilizing LM. The results of multilevel structural equation modelling demonstrated that on a given day, skill utilization was associated with seeking resources, and this relationship was stronger when employees had high boundary control and low task interdependence in their general job roles. Results further demonstrated that employees experienced higher work engagement on days when they sought resources and challenges. Our findings illustrate the motivational potential of job crafting under LM and how crafting activities can be facilitated by the design of jobs and allocation of daily tasks.     

The ‘Collective Pierre Rivière’: Using collective biography and ambling conversational methods to interrogate and re-present pivotal moments from the Pierre Rivière narratives

Collective biography is a research strategy that works at the level of bodily and emotional knowledge and moves beyond individualized versions of the subject, towards subjects-in-process and subjects-in-relation (Davies and Gannon, 2006). In this paper we, the authors, reflect upon and describe our experiences of using collective biography practices as a way of interrogating and writing our way into ‘pivotal moments’ within the Pierre Rivière texts (both book and film). The collective writing about ‘pivotal moments’ that our research group generated during workshops held at a university, exploring the ‘Pierre Rivière’ narratives have then been further reworked into a reflective, layered account, through an ambling conversational process.