| dc.description.abstract | Through a competitive season, the athletes’ experiences of events and social situations can fluctuate due to contextual changes and development over time. To understand the dynamic factors of perception and performance during a competition, it is important to gain an inside perspective of an elite athlete during a competitive season. Therefore, the purpose of the master thesis was to investigate how elite disc golf athletes perceive and interpret the experience of performing during competitive events and training through a disc golf season. Two elite disc golf athletes (n=1 male; n=1 female) were purposive homogeneous sampled and took part in semi-structured interviews and were observed during three different competitions over the course of a competitive season. The participants were interviewed three times at each competitive event: before (T1 = 2 days), immediately after (T = 15 minutes to 2 hours), and after (T3 = 4 to 9 days), together with observation from an onlooker’s point of view (M holes each per round = 10). They were also interviewed before and after a training session. A longitudinal interpretative phenomenological analysis (LIPA) was used to capture temporal and dynamic changes of the participants’ experiences. The findings showed how elite disc golf athletes perceived and performed during a competitive season. The difference between these two athletes were the interpretation and level of meaning of the experience of performing during competition. Indeed, our findings provide an inside perspective of elite athletes’ experience, bringing existential and experiential level of meaning to the athletes. | |
