Sport motivation and doping in adolescent athletes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Although performance-enhancing drugs appear to be prevalent in adolescent sports, relatively little attention has been paid to why adolescent athletes decide to use these drugs. In this study, we examine doping among adolescents from a motivational perspective and explore how motivational variables, such as achievement goal orientations and the perceived self-determination of sports activities, may be related to moral attitudes, doping intentions and doping behavior in adolescents who participate in competitive sports. METHODOLOGY: The study included 1035 adolescents participating in competitive sports from all regions of the Czech Republic (mean age = 16.3 years). The respondents completed a battery of questionnaires assessing their achievement goal orientations (task, ego), sports motivation at various levels of self-determination (intrinsic motivation, external regulation, amotivation), moral attitudes toward sport competition (acceptance of cheating, keeping winning in proportion, attitudes toward doping), doping intentions and doping behavior. A structural equation model was used to test the relations among motivational variables, attitudes, intentions and doping behavior. PRINCIPAL RESULTS: Our analyses indicated a good fit with the proposed model, which explained 59% of the variance in doping intentions and 17.6% of the variance in doping behavior. Within the model, task orientation was positively associated with intrinsic motivation and lower amotivation, whereas ego orientation was positively associated with extrinsic regulation and amotivation. Furthermore, intrinsic motivation was positively associated with keeping winning in proportion and negatively associated with acceptance of cheating and attitudes toward doping; the less self-determined forms of motivation showed opposite relationships. However, only the acceptance of cheating and attitudes toward doping were related to doping intention, which subsequently predicted doping behavior. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The results provide further evidence that sports motivation represents a psychological variable that should be considered in anti-doping policies, programs, and interventions aimed at the adolescent population because motivation was linked to the doping-related attitudinal variables and also partially mediated the effect of achievement goal orientations in this regard. On the basis of these results, we may argue that the focus on intrinsic enjoyment, self-referenced criteria of success and self-improvement may be related to more negative attitudes toward doping and cheating, lower doping intentions and less frequent doping behavior, whereas the emphasis on competition, comparison with others and external motivation appear to be related to the opposite outcomes.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".