impact coaching practice and coach education can be drawn .
Coaching Research - then and now
Understanding this issue further requires some commentary on coaching ’ s ‘ cultural grounding ’ – that is , the historical and intellectual frameworks that have influenced its thinking and practices ( Cushion , Stodter & Clarke , 2021 ). Approaches to coaching and coaching research are historically situated in the changing conditions within wider academic and practical cultures such as education , physical education , and psychology ( cf . Chapman et al ., 2020 ; Cushion et al ., 2021 ). Coaching , as a ‘ hybrid subject ’, will reflect its own theoretical and practical struggles as well as being a proxy for wider debate over disciplinary ‘ turf ’ and what constitutes legitimacy in practice and research ( Lyle & Cushion , 2017 ). Such debates have their roots in different conceptions of the effectiveness of various disciplines in shaping , for example , coach behaviour , thinking processes , social interaction and patterns of culture . Coaching , and therefore its research , as a result , has its own history and character .
Early coaching research from the 1970 ’ s and 1980 ’ s saw systematic observation and leadership models ( drawing on educational and business psychology ) as influential in the devising of coaching behaviour frameworks . A key characteristic of such approaches is the production of objective , reliable and valid data , free from the distortion of suggestion and perception ( Cushion et al ., 2012 ; Kahan 1999 ). This can be attributed to coaching ’ s traditional location within a dominant psychological discourse ( Cushion , 2016 : Downham & Cushion , 2020 ), which in turn , has its epistemological roots in the positivistic natural sciences ( Cushion , 2010 ; Ward & Barret 2002 ). This body of research has been based traditionally on a process-product paradigm which assumes that coaching behaviour is unambiguous and there is a universal set of behaviours that coaches can transfer from one context to another and achieve the same results ( Wragg , 1999 ). However , the paradigmatic roots of this approach have meant that its findings have tended to ‘ reduce ’ and over-simplify the nature of coaching and homogenise coaching contexts – a hangover that can be seen today in the all too frequent lack of consideration in research when describing coaching but not its context .
More recently , and to understand the holistic nature of the coaching process more fully , coaching research has focused on the social world of individual coaches , the interpretations of their experiences and the processes by which meanings and knowledge are used to guide a coach ’ s actions . This , alongside considerable criticism of positivist informed approaches , has set the scene to usher in and nurture alternative paradigms in the study of sport coaching ( Lyle & Cushion , 2017 ). These are largely based on a desire to understand coaching holistically ( cf . Potrac et al ., 2002 ) alongside a shift to a more interpretive and subjective view of the nature of coaching and coaching experience . This has resulted in an increase in interview and observation approaches pioneered by Wade Gilbert ( Gilbert & Trudel 2004b ), and Jean Côté ( Côté et al ., 1995 ). Also , there has been a shift in research focus from understanding coaching to research
6