Book Evaluation - Foundations of Sport & Exercise Psychology

A complete citation for the book
Weinberg, R. S., & Gould, D. (2003). Foundations of Sport & Exercise Psychology. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.

Strategy for finding the book
This is the book I use for more Sports Psychology class. I choose this book because this is the class that inspired the selection of my question. I believe this book will help me a lot when further researching my question to hopefully come up with a strong and valid answer.

General evaluation of the book
This book is extremely current. Some of the experiments and thesis are dated, but the older experiments and thesis are important to show how far the current research has come. The authors are accredited doctors respectively from the University of Miami and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The intended audience is to those that are interested in learning about Sports and Exercise Science, or even those whom would like to better their performance on the playing field of their choice. The ideas presented in this book are coherent with those presented on the website I evaluated, and this makes both sources very creditable.

Example strategies used to search within the book
Searching for information in this book is fairly easy. A table of contents and an index are available for a quick search. When I was searching for Motivation it was extremely easy, I just flipped in the table of contents to the 3 Chapter- Motivation. Within the chapter I found all the information to support my question and allow me to gain more knowledge on the subject. The term I used to search was motivation and that was the heading of a chapter so everything came to me without much effort.

A brief summary of the information yielded by the book.
In the book I found the actual definition of motivation to be the direction and intensity of one’s effort (52). The book offered many forms of motivation and many ways to motivate individuals. The book gave me an in dept understanding that there is more to motivation than what I thought. I always thought motivation was considered the way to get certain individuals to do certain things. The book taught me that motivation can be aroused from traits and or situations. But the element of the book that I believe gave me the most information was the Five Guidelines for Building Motivation, which are the following: 1)Both Situations and Traits Motivate People 2)People Have Multiple Motives for Involvement 3)Change the Environment to Enhance Motivation 4)Leaders Influence Motivation 5)Use Behavior Modification to Change Undesirable Participant Motives (56-58). This book gives me a general idea to answer my question.

A revised draft of your research question, if one is needed
I decided not to revise my question because I have a general idea of how to answer my question, and I like the way my question is now.

Kenny Owens