Relative Age Effect in Canadian Hockey: Prevalence, Perceived Competence and Performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The term "relative age effect" (RAE) is used to describe a bias in which participation in sports (and other fields) is higher among people who were born at the beginning of the relevant selection period than would be expected from the distribution of births. In sports, RAEs may affect the psychological experience of players as well as their performance. This article presents 2 studies. Study 1 aims to verify the prevalence of RAEs in minor hockey and test its associations with players' physical self-concept and attitudes toward physical activities in general. Study 2 verifies the prevalence of the RAE and analyzes the performance of Canadian junior elite players as a function of their birth quartile. In study 1, the sample is drawn from 404 minor hockey players who have evolved from a recreational to an elite level. Physical self-concept and attitudes toward different kinds of physical activities were assessed via questionnaires. Results showed that the RAE is prevalent in minor hockey at all competition levels. Minor differences in favor of Q1-born players were observed regarding physical self-concept, but not attitudes. In study 2, data analyses were conducted from the 2018-2019 Canadian Hockey League database. Birth quartiles were compared on different components of performance by using quantile regression on each variable. Results revealed that RAEs are prevalent in the CHL, with Q1 players tending to outperform Q4 players in games played and power-play points. No other significant differences were observed regarding anthropometric measures and other performance outcomes. RAEs are still prevalent in Canadian hockey. Building up perceived competence and providing game-time exposure are examples of aspects that need to be addressed when trying to minimize RAEs in ice hockey.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".