Development of Research Personnel's Potential in Sport and Health Participation to Improve Individual and Society Quality in the Three Southern Border Provinces Institute of Physical Health Education Yala Campus

Abstract

The purposes of this research were to: (1) establish the Participation Action Research to be employed in this project (2) to develop research personnel's potential in sport and health participation (3) to encourage research participants to conduct PAR academically correctly. (4) to obtain various opinions and suggestions pertaining to participation in the project. The target group comprised of 33 personnel from Institute of Physical Education, Yala Campus and other organizations in the three southern border provinces,

Research procedure was divided into three phases : planning, conducing the research and assessing research operation. In planning session, problems were analyzed and discussed in order to set up resolution guidelines for developing the curriculum through workshops among experts, researchers and the target group.

During the practice session, the target groups were trained to conduct five complete researches by following PAR procedures. In-depth interviews, group discussion observation, questionnaires for quantitative and qualitative assessment were employed. Besides, statistical frequency, percentage, Mean and Standard Deviation were employed to analyze the data. Based on the analysis, participants showed high level of satisfaction towards the PAR workshop.

T-test was used to compare participants' level of opinions before and after their participation in the project. The results indicated that knowledge, interest, satisfaction, planning, assignment within a group, working in team, application of technical methods and the chance to perform PAR showed statistical significant difference at the level of 0.001. Meanwhile, co-operation, participation between researchers and consultants showed statistical significant difference at the level of 0.01. In addition, research performance affected the management of class teaching and learning with the statistical significant difference at the level of 0.05. As for general suggestions (1) PAR proposal should be

submitted to National Research Council of Thailand for the research grant of the budget year 2009; (2) PAR should be applied to use in class teaching and learning activities and to develop students' virtue, ethics and professional experience training; (3) based on PAR, the conventional practice pattern of certain organizations should be changed.

Recommendations for further studies :(1) instructors should be encouraged to increase the application of PAR in class teaching and learning activities (2) training programs should be provided to support more instructors who are interested in PAR.