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Hi everyone,
My name is Aurélie, I am a PhD candidate in the field of National elite sport policy at Victoria University in Melbourne. I am interested in applying the concepts of realist evaluation to my research, but I am reaching a bit of a conceptual road block because of the scope of my study i.e a national policy framework. I would greatly appreciate to receive some feedback / potential direction on the following. (I am new to this list, so I hope I used this email list correctly!).
The aims of my research are to identify key national Paralympic sport policy factors and key contextual factors that influence a country's success (medal outcomes) in international Paralympic sport competitions. My work builds on the work of previous studies called SPLISS - (Sport Policies factors Leading to International Sporting Success). The SPLISS framework was developed to compare national elite sport policies (study that involved 15 countries) to identify whether or not there was a correlation between key sport policy pillars (e.g. coaching development, talent identification, sport governance etc.) and Olympic success. The international comparison was inconclusive (there was no clear correlation between the policy pillars and success) and the suggestion of the study was that the effectiveness of the policy pillars to achieve sporting success depend on the "context" of the country. So I started reading the realist evaluation literature because the logical continuation of these studies to me was that the next framework would need to include "context" when assessing/evaluating national - Paralympic (in my case) - sport policies. The field of disability sport studies also suggested that a Paralympic policy framework could not avoid to integrate the "context", because of the various socio-political situations of people with disabilities in sport/society.
With that understanding, I developed the following research aims for my project: to identify Paralympic sport policy factors (i.e. potential "mechanisms") + identify key contextual factors which influence these policy factors (i.e. potential "context"), that are critical for = Paralympic medals ("outcomes").
What I originally intended to do was to identify these factors and the potential relations between them to "develop a national elite Paralympic sport policy assessment framework" that countries could use to evaluate their policies in relation to Paralympic success. The purpose of my research is not to evaluate but to develop a conceptual / evaluation framework that could be used to evaluate.
As part of my PhD, I was able to collect exploratory data from 23 open-ended interviews with national Paralympic sport managers from 4 different countries, on their opinions about what they think are key elements for Paralympic success and related contextual factors. I have just finished coding inductively the interview data and I am now trying to re-engage with the concepts of realist evaluation. But... the scope of analysis (a country) is overwhelming and considering the time I have left in my PhD (1 year) and that my PhD supervisors are not familiar with realist evaluation, I would like to make a decision on whether or not it would be realist for me to engage with the "mechanisms" and "context" concepts or not.
I did not found in the literature (or missed it) any study/ies that used the concepts of realist evaluation beyond a program level. I would like to know if anyone has tried to use realist evaluation to develop a national level evaluation framework, and if not, whether anyone would be able to point out someone / some reading that could help me.
Thank you very much in advance for your input.
Kind regards,
Aurélie Pankowiak
PhD Candidate, National Elite Paralympic Sports Policies
Research Assistant, Industry Project Victoria University/SportsHosts<https://www.sportshosts.com/>
Institute For Health and Sport (IHES) <https://www.vu.edu.au/research/institute-for-health-sport>
College of Sport and Exercise Science
Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia
Twitter: @AureliePanko<https://twitter.com/AureliePanko> | LinkedIn: View my profile<https://fr.linkedin.com/in/aureliepankowiak>
Tel: +61421207170
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