Sport psychology practice in Africa: Do culture-specific religion and spirituality matter?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Religious and spiritual observances have been found in sport across parts of the world, notably in South and North America, Oceania and Sub-Saharan Africa. This is attributed to the indigenes’ strong religious and /or spiritual belief in the sacred (God or Allah, a supreme deity, and/ or ancestors), who presumably, can turn the course of any life event in ones favour. To date, the potential connections between religion or spirituality and sport from research and applied consultancy perspectives remain uncharted. This conceptual submission reveals a distinction between religion and spirituality based on evidence from religious studies as well as how these could influence cognitive-behavioural practices in sport. These two phenomenological constructs have been shown to provide individuals with psychological resilience in the face of life adversities (e.g., coping) as well as offer other psychological support aimed at athletes’ optimal functioning, performance enhancement and general well-being. To exemplify their manifestation, some peculiar and unique religious and spiritual practices reminiscent of a typical socio-cultural African context are highlighted. We suggest the use of new perspectives such as the athlete-centered and the RRICC models through different approaches (e.g., reflective practice) to facilitate their integration in sport. Future researchers should target the empirical and functional effects of these indigenous religious and spiritual practices through applied work on sport performance related constructs (e.g., flow and peak experiences, counseling interventions) in Sub-Saharan Africa.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".