engleski

Reasons behind success and failure in sport

Introduction: Attribution theory can help us investigate and understand the reasons or attributes behind peoples' behaviors and different outcomes which can occur in sports settings. Attributions have cognitive, affective and behavioral consequences (Weiner, 1985). Therefore, it is especially important and relevant to investigate how athletes explain the reasons behind their successes and failures in sport. Even though understanding attributions in sports context can be extremely beneficial, there is an evident lack of research in this area conducted on Croatian athletes. Therefore, this study aimed to examine how Croatian student-athletes interpret the reasons behind their most and least successful competition and whether the pattern of their attributes supported attribution theory predictions. Methods: The sample was 65 (40 male and 25 female) student-athletes from the team and individual sports who were in average 20 years old (M=19, 97 ; SD=, 901). At the time of the data collection, all participants were active athletes. To measure the attribution dimensions, we used Weiner's attribution model and Croatian version of the Causal Dimension Scale (CDS-II ; McAuley, Duncan, and Russell, 1992). Results: The Cohen's d coefficient was the statistic utilized to understand differences between attributions for success and failure. The results showed large effect size for stability dimension (d=.85), the medium effect size for the locus of causality (d=.49) and personal control (d=.58) dimensions, and negligible effect size for external control dimension (d=.05). These results overall supported attribution theory predictions. Conclusion: These results can help us further understand how athletes explain the reasons behind their successes and failures. The pattern of attributes has significant practical implications, especially for post-competition evaluation. We encourage more study of attribution theory in competitive sports settings.

attributions, athletes, psychology

nije evidentirano