Revisiting how sport psychology can best be illustrated

Abstract

In this paper we revisit the question, how can sport psychology best be illustrated? There have been many interesting works produced in recent years that have displayed conversations between sport psychologists and athletes. In our view there are problems in analysing and commenting on transcripts that are not based on real-life psychological practice. Many works have not considered the importance of recording and representing real-life practice, and so have glossed over the original question, how can sport psychology best be illustrated? This has lessened what they can contribute to understanding how sport psychology is practiced. To illustrate this point, we present a short extract of real-life therapy talk that centres on the therapist's question, have you seen a psychologist before? The audio recording of this psychologist-client talk was presented in our conference presentation, and we display transcripts of this therapy talk in three different forms in this paper: a Jeffersonian transcript, a verbatim transcript, and an idealised script. We use data from these transcripts to show that choosing a transcription format has consequences for how we can understand psychological practice.