Exploring the role of specific conscientiousness facets on sport-specific practice and skill development among athletes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Conscientiousness (C), the tendency to control one's behaviour in the service of goals (McCrae & Lockenhöff, 2010), is a dispositional variable consistently linked to performance achievement outside sport (e.g., Poropat, 2014). It also influences sport success (Malinauskas et al., 2014), however, research has yet to examine specific facets of C in relation to sport expertise development. Junior (ages 12-17) and senior (ages 18-43) athletes (120 male, 108 female; sport involvement = 14.05 hrs/wk, SD = 8.09) completed 60 survey items from the International Personality Item Pool assessing six C traits (i.e., self-efficacy, orderliness, dutifulness, achievement striving, self-discipline, and cautiousness), questions to determine skill level (beginner/intermediate; advanced; expert groups), and items assessing sport-specific practice amounts, engagement in practice contexts, and threats to practice commitment. An original 6-factor measurement model showed very poor fit (CFI = .67) and inferior item loadings. EFA (direct oblimin) resulted in a refined 8-factor model with 32 items. We advanced all scale scores to concurrent validity tests. Controlling for age, only 'achievement striving' was correlated with practice amounts (r = .23, p = .005). Associations with engagement in practice and with threats to commitment were found for all other C traits suggesting that each uniquely contributes to athletes' involvement in practice contexts. Using multinomial logistic regression, we found that athletes who scored one unit higher on achievement striving were 5.34 times as likely to belong to the expert group compared to the beginner/intermediate group, suggesting that the tendency to set higher goals and work harder toward those goals is associated with more expert levels of skill development.Acknowledgments: This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) through the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (767-2013-2136).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".