Qualitative Scouting?

[evanperryg]

Originally Posted by Green Potato

Generally speaking, the problem with qualitative information is that different scouts have different reactions on the same event, and some form of training/ rubric is extremely helpful, even 100% necessary if your scouts are, like ours, younger team members.

If you go quantitative, you need to make sure that you can accurately interpret the data you get. If you don't attach any external meaning to a statistic you collect (shots, cycles, etc) it literally isn't a statistic any more, and looses its value as a result. Also, It's a good idea to add a "comments" area: some times, it's not obvious if action X should be counted in statistic Y, so allowing the individual scout to write it down is quite helpful.

You've brought up a couple really good points. Any team looking to do good qualitative scouting should record who is taking what notes. We can go back and see, "okay, this person said this about this team, and this person said this about the same team." This allows us to negate the effects of scouter bias, and discussion between disagreeing qualitative scouters can bring out amazing details on a team's strengths and weaknesses. Also, track the match numbers corresponding to specific notes, this allows you to easily explain anomalies in quantitative performance.

Remember, qualitative data is helpful alone, and so is quantitative data. However, when the two are combined efficiently and effectively, you can derive much more from the data than you could with either one alone.