A qualitative investigation exploring the motivational climate in early career sports participants: Coach, parent and peer influences on sport motivation (original) (raw)
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Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 2010
This study qualitatively examined the motivationally relevant behaviors of key social agents in specializing sport participants. Seventy-nine participants (9–18 years old) from 26 sports participated in semi-structured focus groups investigating how coaches, parents, and peers may influence motivation. Using a critical-realist perspective, an inductive content analysis indicated that specializing athletes perceived a multitude of motivationally relevant social cues. Coaches’ and parents’ influences were related to their specific roles: instruction/assessment for coaches, support-and-facilitation for parents. Peers influenced motivation through competitive behaviors, collaborative behaviors, evaluative communications, and through their social relationships. The results help to delineate different roles for social agents in influencing athletes’ motivation.
How Coaches, Parents, and Peers Influence Motivation in Sport
Frontiers for Young Minds
When you practice and compete in sport, there are other people involved who support you in some way: coaches, parents, friends, and opponents. These people can influence how you feel about playing sport, through their actions, reactions, emotional expressions, and language. Our motivation in sport is not as simple as “more-v-less,” but rather we experience a whole range of motivating/demotivating factors at the same time. Some motivators seem to feel natural and come from within us, while others seem to come from outside ourselves—like prizes, punishments, and peer pressure. We can be motivated toward an activity (“I want to do that!”), or away from it (“I do not want to do that!”). We can define success and failure in various ways, too. For example, we can compare ourselves to others (“Did I win?” “How did I rank?”), or we can strive for learning and improvement (“I finally did it, it worked!”). The motivational climate in sport refers to the way people around you influence these a...
A qualitative investigation of the motivational climate in elite sport
Objectives: This study examined the construction of the motivational climate surrounding elite sports performers by investigating the behaviours of coaches, peers and parents that were perceived to be motivationally relevant by elite athletes. Design: Qualitative e inductive. Method: Twenty-eight national, international and world-class athletes (15e29 years old) took part in semi-structured focus groups and interviews investigating how they believe coaches, parents, and peers influence their motivation. Results: An inductive content analysis indicated that elite athletes perceived a multitude of motivationally-relevant social cues. Coaches and peers were reported to be focal influences, whilst the role of parents appeared to be limited to emotional and moral support. Themes of feedback/evaluation, and pre-performance motivating behaviours were common to all social agents, whereas only the coach eathlete and peereathlete relationships appeared to be important in moderating and directly influencing motivation towards sport. The influences of social agents related to the specific roles they performed in the athlete's life: instruction and leadership for coaches; emotional support, collaborative and/ or competitive behaviours for peers, and for parents, a diminished role relative to when the athletes were younger. Conclusions: A central finding of the paper is that there was no discernible one-to-one correspondence between specific behaviours and their impact on motivation. Instead, the findings suggest complex contextual interactions between the immediate behaviours of social agents and the impact on the athlete's motivation. If supported, this finding would necessitate new and novel approaches in future research in order to facilitate a more advanced understanding of athlete motivation in elite sport.
Peer motivational climate in youth sport: a qualitative inquiry
Little is known about the influence and nature of the motivational climate initiated by peer groups on children's sport behavior and experiences. To address this research need, in-depth interviews were employed in order to identify the factors that underpin the motivational climate created by peers in youth sport.
Objectives: The purpose of this study was to examine the additive and interactive influence of perceptions of the coach-and peer-created motivational climates (MC) on affective (physical self-worth, enjoyment, trait anxiety) and behavioral (exerted effort as rated by the coach) responses of young athletes. Age and gender differences in athletes' views regarding these psychological environments were also examined. Design: Cross-sectional; participants responded to a number of questionnaires assessing peer and coach motivational climate, and affective and behavioral responses in youth sport. Methods: Participants were 493 young athletes, age 12-17 years (M ageZ14.08; SDZ1.29), from various individual and team sports. Results: Hierarchical regression analyses, controlling for age and gender, showed that a perceived task-involving peer MC was the only predictor of physical self-worth. A perceived ego-involving coach climate emerged as the only predictor of trait anxiety. Enjoyment was predicted positively by both coach and peer task-involving MCs, whereas reported effort was predicted only by the coach task-involving MC. A 2-way MANOVA revealed that perceptions of ego-involving coach and peer MCs were higher among males, whereas females reported higher perceptions of task-involving coach and peer MCs, whereas no age differences were identified. A significant agegender interaction effect on the peer ego-involving MC emerged. Conclusions: The findings provide evidence for the importance of peer-created MC in youth sport and suggest that both coach and peer influence should be considered in future research on young athletes' self perceptions and motivation-related responses in sport. q
2014
This study represents a qualitative synthesis of research examining the socio-environmental influences of coaches, parents and peers on athlete motivation, across the athletic career-span. Using a critical-realist perspective, meta-interpretation methodology was deployed to search and analyse the literature. On-going, iterative analysis generated new areas of enquiry and new search terms, until the emerging analysis reached the points of saturation. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were developed during this process to produce a clear statement of applicability for the study. In the final analysis, a developmental structure was specified to describe the athletic career trajectory, together with a horizontal structure capturing seven domains of the motivational atmosphere surrounding athletes (competition, training, evaluation, emotion, authority, social-support, and relatedness), and a vertical structure varying in terms of level-of-abstraction: The global/ broad 'motivational atmosphere' containing contextual 'climates', built from immediate/situational 'motivational conditions'. A model of the overall 'motivational atmosphere' in sport, based on a meteorological analogy, is offered with a view to stimulating critical debate and new research directions that reflect the complexity of interpersonal motivation in sport.
This study represents a qualitative synthesis of research examining the socio-environmental influences of coaches, parents and peers on athlete motivation, across the athletic career-span. Using a critical-realist perspective, meta-interpretation methodology was deployed to search and analyse the literature. On-going, iterative analysis generated new areas of enquiry and new search terms, until the emerging analysis reached the points of saturation. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were developed during this process to produce a clear statement of applicability for the study. In the final analysis, a developmental structure was specified to describe the athletic career trajectory, together with a horizontal structure capturing seven domains of the motivational atmosphere surrounding athletes (competition, training, evaluation, emotion, authority, social-support, and relatedness), and a vertical structure varying in terms of level-of-abstraction: The global/ broad 'motivational atmosphere' containing contextual 'climates', built from immediate/situational 'motivational conditions'. A model of the overall 'motivational atmosphere' in sport, based on a meteorological analogy, is offered with a view to stimulating critical debate and new research directions that reflect the complexity of interpersonal motivation in sport.
Development and Validation of the Motivational Climate Scale for Youth Sports
Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 2008
The Motivational Climate Scale for Youth Sports (MCSYS) provides an age-appropriate measure of coach-initiated motivational climates in youth sports. Items have a readability level of grade 4.0 or below. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed that both child and adolescent athletes (ages 9–14) discriminate between mastery- and ego-involving coaching behaviors. The MCSYS demonstrated acceptable reliability and strong factorial validity. Construct
Journal of Human Sport and Exercise, 2019
The first purpose of this study was to longitudinally examine achievement goals in youth sport. The second purpose was to examine the within-person effects of perceived motivational climates by coaches, peers, and parents on achievement goal orientation. Participants were 78 young student-athletes, representing a variety of sports. The student-athletes completed a multi-section questionnaire, six times over a three-year period, assessing the study variables. Multilevel modelling analysis revealed that both task orientation and ego orientation decreased for this age group over the three-year period. Furthermore, perceived task-involving peer climate was significantly and positively related to task orientation, and perceived ego-involving coach climate was significantly and positively related to ego orientation. The results from this study provides insights regarding developmental changes in achievement goals and the importance of certain social agents in that specific developmental stage.
Peer motivational climate in youth sport: Measurement development and validation
… of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 2005
The influence of the peer group on young people's achievement motivation has been highlighted in the literature as an area that needs examination (e.g., . To this effect, a new measure of youngsters' perceptions of the peer motivational climate (Peer Motivational Climate in Youth Sport Questionnaire; PeerMCYSQ) was developed and tested across three studies. In Study 1, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) with 431 athletes between the ages of 11 to 16 years suggested that the PeerMCYSQ had 6 factors that could also be subsumed into 2 higher order factors (Task-Involving climate: improvement, relatedness support, effort; Ego-Involving climate: intra-team competition, normative ability, intra-team conflict). In Studies 2 and 3 the 6-factor solution and the corresponding hierarchical one were tested using CFA with two independent samples (N = 606 and 495, respectively) of similar age. The results showed that the 6-factor model was problematic and that a 5-factor solution should be preferred instead. Further support to the 5-factor model was provided with hierarchical and multilevel CFAs. Suggestions for further research on peer motivational climate are discussed.