Operating under pressure: A scoping review on stress, anxiety, and coping in sport officials
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Officials experience a range of external (e.g., abuse, peer conflict, competition pressures) and internal stressors (e.g., fear of making mistakes). Despite the importance of officials, and their pressurized work environment leaving them susceptible to stress, a thorough review of stress, anxiety, and coping in this population has yet to be conducted. As such, the aim of this review is to map existing research on stress, anxiety, and coping in officials and thereby identify gaps in the literature. Following the framework by Arksey and O'Malley (2005), four databases were searched for articles that met inclusion criteria. Fifty-three articles were included in this scoping review which were conducted across 19 countries and included diverse samples in terms of officiating level and age. However, of the total 10,341 participants, only 8.8 % were women. Synthesized article findings highlight that officials experience multiple stressors which were situational, relational, and/or organizational in nature. Officials attempted to combat stress and anxiety through various coping strategies, but approach-coping was deemed to be the most useful. The consequences of stress, anxiety, and an inability to cope included poor decision making and performance, burnout, and intentions to quit. Although findings present valuable insights into stress and coping in officials, 32 % of research was conducted pre-2000, meaning the current body of literature may not reflect how stress is experienced by officials in modern sporting environments. Future researchers should broaden study scope, employ more qualitative study designs, and diversify participant sampling.
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 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 | 0.004 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".