Perceptions and Experiences of Psychological Readiness During the Return to Sport After Injury
Bibliographic record
Abstract
UniversityAthletes are often given permission by health professionals to return to sport (RTS) after injury based primarily on physical competencies with limited emphasis on psychological readiness (PR). There is no definition of PR consistently used in the literature; therefore, it is imperative to explore perceptions and experiences of athlete PR to understand PR and its influence more accurately on rehabilitation and the RTS process. PR is broadly conceptualized as the dynamic psychological process including factors of realistic expectation, confidence, motivation, and focus (Podlog et al., 2015; Podlog et al., 2022). Athletes who are not psychologically ready to RTS, despite achieving physical healing and functional progressions, may lack motivation and confidence in their abilities (Podlog et al., 2015) and experience anxiety or feel depressed (Tracey, 2003). Some may also fear re-injury (Ardern et al., 2014), worry about future performance (Podlog & Eklund, 2006), incur further injury (McCullough et al., 2012; Webster & Hewett, 2019), or drop out of sport (Ardern et al., 2014). In consideration of these complexities and inadequate evidence of physical parameters alone to determine readiness, the purpose of the study was to explore injured athletes’ perceptions and experiences of PR during rehabilitation and after return to competition (RTC). A qualitative phenomenological design employing semi-structured interviews focused on athletes’ experiences of PR surrounding the RTS process. Thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019) with 15 collegiate student-athletes before and after RTC (30 interviews total) produced three themes: focus, confidence, and realistic expectations. Findings highlight the importance of facilitating a more inclusive understanding of PR from an athlete perspective and for researchers and practitioners to consider readiness comprehensively within RTS protocols.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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 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".