Life after sport : the relationship between athletic identity and mental health outcomes after sport retirement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research continues to expand in light of the growing interest in affecting healthy and positive sport career transition outcomes. Theories focusing on athlete transition have helped shape our understanding of the retirement experiences of competitive athletes; however, existing research has demonstrated mixed findings. Whereas some studies suggest that a significant proportion of athletes experience psychological complications upon sport career retirement, other studies have obtained minimal evidence of distress. The present study explored the relationships among athletic identity, mental health and well-being outcomes, and coping, both prior to and after retirement from interuniversity sport. A survey design was utilized with retiring varsity athletes across fourteen different sports at multiple western Canadian universities. Participants were asked to complete the survey approximately one month in to their final season of competition and approximately three months post-retirement. Measures in the survey included demographic questionnaires, Athletic Identity Measurement Scale (Brewer, Van Raalte, & Linder, 1993), Flourishing Scale (Diener, Wirtz, Tov, Kim-Prieto, Choi, Oishi, & Biswas-Diener, 2009), State-Trait Anxiety Inventory Y-1 (Speilberger, Gorsuch, Lushene, Vagg, & Jacobs, 1983), Brief COPE Inventory (Carver, 1997), Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression Scale (Radloff, 1977), Satisfaction With Life Scale (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985), and Subjective Vitality Scale (Ryan & Frederick, 1997). Both descriptive (i.e., means, standard deviations) and inferential statistics (i.e., ANOVA, correlation) were calculated. Results indicated that athletes who had higher athletic identity had elevated depressive symptomology and state anxiety in comparison to athletes with lower athletic identity, after sport retirement. Results pertaining to the impact of coping on mental health and well-being variables, and their relation to athletic identity, were also supported. Particularly, athletes with higher athletic identity were found to use venting and self-distraction coping strategies significantly more than athletes with lower athletic identity, following sport career termination. Findings from the present study inform future research investigations and contribute new knowledge to the sport retirement and athlete career transition literature. With increased understanding of the psychological and emotional experience of retiring athletes, counselling and sport psychology professionals can provide the appropriate support and guidance required for adaptive transitions out of sport.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".