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Record W4412902680 · doi:10.1037/spy0000393

“It’s hard to define and really hard to implement”: Competitive women athletes’ descriptions of self-compassion.

2025· article· en· W4412902680 on OpenAlexfundno aff
Leah J. Ferguson, Karissa L. Johnson, Margo E. K. Adam, Kent C. Kowalski, Amber D. Mosewich, Benjamin J. I. Schellenberg, Kate Storey

Bibliographic record

VenueSport Exercise and Performance Psychology · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicSport Psychology and Performance
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
KeywordsAthletesPsychologySelf-compassionSport psychologyCompetitive athletesCompassionSocial psychologyApplied psychologyMindfulnessPsychotherapist

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Research on self-compassion as an important resource for women athletes is increasing at an impressive rate. However, there can be misunderstandings about what self-compassion is and is not. This is perhaps not surprising given that self-compassion is not part of most athletes’ common vernacluar. The best language to use when talking about self-compassion with women athletes remains unclear. The purpose of this qualitative description study was to explore women athletes’ understandings of self-compassion, particularly their language used to describe the construct. Competitive women athletes (N =19; Mage = 22.6 years, SD = 5.4) were invited to participate in two phases of virtual focus groups. Phase 1 generated information regarding women athletes’ descriptions of self-compassion. Elo and Kyngäs’ (2008) content analysis was used to prepare, organize, and report the data into content-specific themes. Preliminary themes were shared with participants in Phase 2 (11 of the original 19 participants returned), after which all focus group transcripts (i.e., Phase 1 and Phase 2) were (re)analyzed using the same analytic approach. Three themes were generated: (a) Show up (driven by empowerment, supporting myself as I support others), (b) Regroup (honestly checking in with myself for real expectations), and (c) Trust (trusting the process and trusting myself). The language used by participants to describe self-compassion incorporates elements of both tender (i.e., comforting reassurance) and fierce (i.e., protecting and providing) forms of self-compassion. Findings provide relevant and useful information for researchers, applied practitioners, and sport personnel seeking to communicate with women athletes about self-compassion.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.004
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.007
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.012
Threshold uncertainty score0.025

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0040.007
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0060.010
Scholarly communication0.0040.004
Open science0.0010.004
Research integrity0.0020.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.022
GPT teacher head0.327
Teacher spread0.305 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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