Prospective associations between sport participation and psychological adjustment in adolescents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Engaging in sport has been suggested to be mitigate against psychological distress. Using a prospective-longitudinal design, we examine whether sport participation is associated with reduced psychological difficulties in adolescents and whether associations differ by sport and personal characteristics. METHODS: 17 550 adolescents from grade 7 to 10 (mean age=14.4 years old) self-reported on sport participation, depressive symptoms, social anxiety symptoms and loneliness in Spring 2007 and 1 year later. Analyses tested the association between sport participation and subsequent psychological difficulties using linear regression, while adjusting for pre-existing psychological and sociodemographic characteristics. Analyses also verified whether associations differed by sport frequency (weekly/more than weekly) and type (team/individual) using Wald tests of parameter constraints, as well as sex, age and pre-existing psychological difficulties using interaction terms. RESULTS: After adjusting for potential confounders, sport participation predicted lower social anxiety symptoms (beta=-0.02 (-0.04, -0.01)) and loneliness (beta=-0.04 (-0.05, -0.02)), but not depressive symptoms. Moderation analyses showed that sport participation predicted greater reductions in depressive symptoms, social anxiety symptoms and loneliness in adolescents with higher baseline scores on each outcome. Associations did not differ by sport frequency and type, sex and age. Post hoc analyses revealed bidirectional associations between sport participation and social anxiety symptoms and loneliness. CONCLUSIONS: Sport participation predicts small reductions in adolescent psychological distress. Reductions seem most important in youth experiencing greater pre-existing psychological difficulty. Our findings suggest that sport participation represents a protective factor that supports psychological resilience in at-risk youth.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".