Philosophical and Methodological Orientation

One purpose of the study was to gain an understanding of athletes’ lived experiences and perceptions of collective team collapse in their specific team sport environment, and a second to develop an inductive theory that displays the phenomenon in these specific situations. Considering this purpose and the limited empirical research exploring the causes of team collapse, a constructivist–interpretivist grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2006) was used to collect and analyze data and subsequently derive a substantive theory (Holt, 2016; Weed, 2017). Constructivists reject the idea of objectivity and assume that the view of the world and certain phenomena rely on individual perceptions of it (Weed, 2017). Since these individual perceptions are subjective due to personal experiences, it is impossible to gain a perfect, unbiased view of the world. Thus, a grounded theory methodology can be used to understand multiple biased perspectives of reality in order to achieve a view that is plausible and representative of the data. Charmaz (2006) described grounded theory as “a systematic, yet flexible methodology for collecting and analyzing qualitative data to construct theories that are grounded in the data themselves” (p. 2). Consequently, she proposed that it was both a method and product of inquiry (Sparkes and Smith, 2014). This methodology enables “an analytical interpretation of the participants’ worlds and the processes constituting how these worlds are constructed” (Charmaz, 2005, p. 508) to generate theory from data.