Human perceptions of sports equipment under playing conditions

Assessment of the 'performance' of sports equipment is generally derived from physical and technical parameters, such as power, speed, distance and accuracy. However, from a psychological perspective, players need to feel comfortable with their equipment and confident in its properties. These factors can only be measured through the subjective assessment of individual perceptions. Focusing on a group of elite golfers, this study presents a formalized approach for eliciting and structuring players' descriptions of their perception of sports equipment. Qualitative methods of inquiry were used to generate perceptions from a group of professional golfers (n = 15) during play testing. The equipment characteristics of significance to the golfers emerged from an inductive analysis of their responses. However, although this method of representation of the results helped to identify the key components or dimensions of a player's subjective perception, it was unable to determine potential relationships between the dimensions. With this in mind, a new technique, called 'structured relationship modelling', was developed. Ten general dimensions emerged from the analysis, of which three are presented here together with a section of the relationship model. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of qualitative techniques for eliciting human perceptions and of structured relationship models for representation of the associations found.