Exploring the Developmental Experiences of Youth Athletes During the Transition to Competitive Sport
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this dissertation was to study athletes’ experiences during a year in which they have the potential to transition from recreational to competitive sport. Two studies are presented in this dissertation to support this aim. Study 1 was a scoping review of positive youth development through sport and athletic transition research and aimed to investigate how theory has informed research in these two bodies of literature. 207 articles and dissertations were included, and data was extracted according to Sandelowski’s (1993) conceptualization of the uses, centrality, and function of theory in research. Main findings included: a limited body of literature that had examined youth athletes’ experiences of transitioning into the athletic pathway; the breadth of developmental and non-developmental theoretical frameworks that have informed youth sport research; and that theories are predominantly used in a peripheral, rather than central manner to introduce youth sport as a developmental context, or to explain findings related to research outcomes. Study 2 was an example of how youth sport transitions can be studied from a developmental approach. Seven parent-child dyads took part in a longitudinal (one year), mixed methods case study to explore how children’s transitions in sport influenced, and were influenced by, their psychosocial development. Children were aged between 8 and 12 (M = 10 years, SD = 1.3 years) and parents were aged between 42 and 51 (M = 44.9 years, SD = 5.1 years) at the start of the study. Participants completed measures of sports experiences, self-perceptions, and social competencies, as well as qualitative interviews at three timepoints during their potential transition. Results were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis and quantitative data was visually inspected in Microsoft Excel. Themes explore children’s experiences related to their self-perceptions and social comparisons during the transition. Additional themes include the impact of physical maturation and the Covid-19 Pandemic for children’s transitions in sport. Collectively, the studies included in this dissertation contribute a novel approach to reviewing youth sport research (namely, by analyzing the use of theory), and documented some of the psychosocial skills that are relevant when studying transitions among youth samples.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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 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".