engleski

How student athletes explain their successes and failures in sport?

Athletes experience success and failure almost on an everyday basis. Because of that, it is especially interesting and important to understand how they explain these outcomes and what are the reasons they think are behind their performances. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate how student athletes explain the causes behind the most and least successful performances of their sports career. Participants in the study were 118 students of University of Zagreb, Faculty of Kinesiology in Croatia (Nm = 77, Nf = 41). All participants were active competitive athletes at one point of their life and 51 of them (43 %) were still actively involved in sport and competing at the time study was conducted. To measure their attributions, we used Weiner’s attribution model and CDS-II scale (McAuley, Duncan, & Russell, 1992). This scale measures attributions across four dimensions: locus of causality, stability, personal control, and external control. In this study, each participant filled the scale twice: once for the most successful performance of their career and once for the least successful performance. The results indicated that student athletes in this study attributed the most successful performance of their sports career to more internal, stable and personally controllable reasons than they did for the least successful performance. There was no significant difference on the external control dimension. These results can help athletes, coaches and sport psychologists to further understand athlete’s perceptions about the reasons they use to explain different outcomes with which they encounter during their experience in the competitive sport.

attributions, sport, athletes

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