Applying Research To Practice - Theory of Falsification: An All or Nothing Approach....?

What's the point of research anyway?

You will have noticed that my blog platform has now changed from Synergies | Pracademic Sport Solutions to Substack (still integrated to the Synergies website), I’m wanting to move with the times so to speak and connect with more like minded groups and individuals....

Whilst a lot of my content recently has been around my applied practice working with athletes at the Adil Rashid Cricket Centre, as part of my Synergies consultancy I’m also a big advocate of informing practice with research. I’m extremely fortunate to have a brilliant research team behind me on my Badminton World Federation funded research projects, some of the key findings / practical applications are already starting to surface: Research | Synergies.

I’ve been busy over the last week analysing data and readying manuscripts for submission. Whilst I was in the process of this, I thought why not switch my attention for my next blog post to ‘research’…. I think the biggest proponent of research I apply, has to be critical appraisal / evaluation - not taking what you see at face value, and considering carefully new findings you discover, before recommending practical application to a wider audience.

During my time studying and working in sport science I’ve been in the midst of that bridging between research and the field, creating and devising experimental design that is representative of the environment that athletes train and compete in is potentially pivotal for understanding sporting performance.

Me at the Glasgow 2017 Badminton World Federation World Championships testing international badminton players for my PhD project on the forehand badminton smash

It probably doesn’t get any better than to test some of the best international badminton players from around the world on actual training courts with a 3D motion capture system… which was an opportunity I had whilst conducting my PhD research (links to my PhD thesis and ISBS conference publication: Afzal et al., 2020; Afzal et al., 2021). On reflection, yes incredible feat, 52 international badminton players’ data collected over two days of an international tournament, with some quality data in which the process for collection was streamlined and double checked numerous times to make sure that our retro-reflective marker placement and camera calibration was spot on in such a intense testing environment (international badminton player’s potentially preparing to get ready to compete in the World Championship tournament hall, next door!). All sounds perfect doesn’t it, smooth sailing, research though is never perfect…. trying to control all variables, maintaining ecological validity whilst trying to be representative of the sport/activity in question is difficult and I might even go to the extent of saying ‘nigh on impossible’.

For example you may have noticed from the image of the 2017 Glasgow World Championships badminton testing above, that we opted to use a Shuttlecock machine for the feed and a target board for accuracy, this doesn’t seem to be very representative of the sport of badminton…..? This was a question I raised multiple times with my supervisors (with me coming from a predominantly coaching/badminton background), the reply back / rebuttal was “we need to control our variables Idrees - we need to have the same feed each time and there needs to be a target so we can reliably measure accuracy (as we used Fitts’ Law as a framework for our experimental design)”. Okay…. me “but the Constraints theory which I previously studied at Sheffield Hallam advocates that we have to maintain the coupling between perception and action - therefore we should have a racket feeder or an actual simulated badminton scenario!…. supervisor’s reply “No Idrees we can’t do that” we have to control our variables, the feed needs to be the same velocity and cadence for each player, otherwise this won’t be a fair experiment… Idrees “okay (speech bubble)…” end of conversation :)

Reminiscing on my supervisory meetings aside, what I’m really trying to get at is that experimental design however you manipulate your variables or equipment is never perfect, optimal or ecologically aligned… it’s a learning process, with iterations and deep reflection required. Remembering, that the subsequent data you explore and potential findings from this could be used to change practice, alter coaching interventions or even change theoretical frameworks/approaches. This brings me back nicely to my MSc Research methods module where I was taught by Prof. Edward Winter (who sadly passed several years ago), Edward / Ed as he asked us to refer to him, was very passionate around the area of ‘epistemology of research’ and on numerous occasions would quiz me on one of the leading philosophers in the field, ‘Karl Popper (1963)’ well known for his ‘Theory of Falsification’: ‘stating that scientific inquiry should aim not to verify hypotheses but to rigorously test and identify conditions under which they are false’… Eh… you might say, why would you want to prove a theory to be false?? Well it links well with what I’ve discussed above, all theories, ideas and concepts should be held to account, Popper (1963) suggests that ‘scientific theories possess potential falsifiers, and their claims about the world might later be discovered to be false’. Nothing in scientific research is certain, critically evaluating our work and attempting to first try and disprove our hypothesis, will only justify and make stronger our assumptions and potential recommendations.

I often wondered over the years, why Ed honed in on Karl Popper and kept reminding me of him, and it was only until a few days ago that it really clicked on a Research Design and Statistics article collection released by the Journal of Sport Sciences, where I came across one of Ed’s papers: ‘Estimation versus falsification approaches in sport and exercise science (2018)’. Much of the null hypothesis testing we see in statistical analysis derives from a falsification approach, i.e. you either reject (falsify) or accept the hypothesis. Ed often talked to us about how this was an ‘all or nothing’ approach and why we should always be weary of reporting statistical significance alone. Of course this brought about some of Ed’s later work and what he phrased during lectures as ‘Metrics of meaningfulness as opposed to sleights of significance’. This was alliteration to remind us to report statistical findings with their magnitudes (effect sizes), something that is now common practice in sport science research.

Learning, developing and constantly refining research is imperative; the bridge between research and practice is a turbulent one, but one as a sports science community we have to go on to progress the field, be innovative and improve or reimagine sport performance! That’s very much my remit for Synergies | Pracademic Sport Solutions!

Please do leave a comment or feel free to get in touch with me if your interested to discuss more about my current research and applied practice endeavours.

All the very best, Idrees

References

1. Afzal, I. A., McErlain-Naylor, S. A., Hiley, M., & King, M. (2020). Spatial speed-accuracy trade-off in international badminton players performing the forehand smash. ISBS Proceedings Archive, 38(1), 240.

2. Afzal, I. (2021). Performance, control and variability of the forehand badminton smash during different spatio-temporal constraints (Doctoral dissertation, Loughborough University).

3. Popper, K. R. (1963). Science as falsification. Conjectures and refutations, 1(1963), 33-39.

4. Wilkinson, M., & Winter, E. M. (2019). Estimation versus falsification approaches in sport and exercise science. Journal of Sports Sciences, 37(1), 3-4.

5. Winter, E. M., Abt, G. A., & Nevill, A. M. (2014). Metrics of meaningfulness as opposed to sleights of significance. Journal of sports sciences, 32(10), 901-902.