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Situation awareness in soccer. / Paul Douglas Jones

Swansea University Author: Paul Douglas Jones

Abstract

Individual player awareness of the situation has been studied in the general psychology field under the term Situation Awareness (SA). In brief SA refers to how aware you are of everything in the environment around you (Endsley, 2000a). There has been little acknowledgement of this term in the sport...

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Published: 2005
Institution: Swansea University
Degree level: Master of Philosophy
Degree name: M.Phil
URI: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa42481
Abstract: Individual player awareness of the situation has been studied in the general psychology field under the term Situation Awareness (SA). In brief SA refers to how aware you are of everything in the environment around you (Endsley, 2000a). There has been little acknowledgement of this term in the sports literature (James & Patrick, 2004) but is popular within the aircraft domain (Rodgers, Mogford & Strauch, 2000). However, as James and Patrick (2004) suggest parallels can be drawn between these two awareness tasks. The first study attempted to see whether poor SA was a cause of errors made by soccer players. Twelve English Premier League games were analysed with the aim of identifying aspects of play where a player's poor SA resulted in an error. All video clips containing errors attributed to SA were then placed into nine categories based on the task requirements to achieve SA. Some further video clips containing errors attributed to poor performance and not SA were selected as 'control clips'. A compilation video containing three clips for each SA category and five for the control category was shown to a panel of expert raters to decide whether the mistake was due to lack of awareness or bad performance. An inter-rater reliability test indicated that the expert soccer coaches agreed that 19 of the 32 clips contained an error in performance as a result of poor SA, none of which was a control clip. The raters thought the player on these clips to be close to completely unaware (mean rating = 6.17 on a 7pt Likert scale, SD = 0.75) of the important feature causing the performance error i.e. they were rated as having very poor SA. By adopting a task led perspective this study has suggested that in at least seven different situations, two were excluded due to weak rater agreement, poor SA is a possibility which in turn can cause performance error. Having identified seven categories of game situation within soccer that make SA deficiencies a possibility it was necessary to measure a soccer player's SA during these events. Ericsson (2003) has suggested that artificial conditions may fail to capture the nature of an experts' performance and thus an ecologically valid setting was required. The seven categories were merged into four to facilitate the data collection phase as this meant that it was more likely that a particular category would occur during a match because the category descriptors were not so precise. A novel technique was used to measure participants SA; PLATO liquid crystal occlusion spectacles (Milgram, 1987) were worn and turned opaque simultaneous to the game being suspended. A pitch schematic was then presented to the participant to record awareness measures (accuracy, frequency and confidence of the location of team mates and opponents). Participant responses were compared to a video recording to assess accuracy and results showed the participants were able to relatively accurately (to within a few metres) locate 60.78% of the other nine players (goalkeepers were excluded) on the pitch. It is however unknown how this relates to full size matches. Some form of discrimination in their attention allocation was also evident as more of the important players (about 74%) were located than the unimportant ones (about 49%). Some bias was also found toward attending to opponents above team mates based on the fact that the error associated with opponent location estimations were lower than for team mates although only significantly for important players (team mates M = 2.13m, SD = 2.62; opponents M = 0.94m, SD = 1.47). This was thought to be due to players knowing their team mates' locations as a result of familiarity of team positions. This hypothesis needs to be tested by having players play in unfamiliar teams and in different positions. The findings are limited by the use of six-a-side matches on a reduced size pitch as it is impossible to say how many players participants would be aware of during the full soccer match. The situations used in this study were also hand picked as being likely for SA to be poor and so these results may be indicative of relatively low awareness. However since play was suspended before a mistake could be made it is not possible to ascertain this. Certainly this study did not capture the diversity of the soccer environment as suggested by James and Patrick (2004) as necessary for predictive validity and therefore future studies need to broaden the situations tested. Finally the extent to which these findings translate to other players of different abilities and experience needs to be assessed via the classical expert novice paradigm, preferably using full match simulations.
Keywords: Kinesiology.;Sports Management.
College: Faculty of Science and Engineering

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