The Influence of Parent Sport Behaviours on Children’s Development: Youth Coach and Administrator Perspectives

There has been much literature and anecdotal accounts reporting poor parental behaviours in the youth sporting context. Youth coaches and administrators, who regularly interact with parents within the youth sporting domain, are potentially a key source for investigating the influence of parents' sport-related behaviours on youths' sporting experiences. Nevertheless, the voice of coaches and administrators has been limited. In this study, the authors sought to develop an understanding of youth sport coaches' and administrators' perspectives of parent sport behaviours' influence on children's development across various sport settings. Additionally, the authors explored participant awareness of and their perspectives of efficacy in relation to current parent education programs in Australia. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twelve youth sport coaches and administrators (eight coaches, four administrators; eight males, four females) with an average of nine years experience. Coaches and administrators reported considerably more frequent negative interactions with parents than positive interactions. Participants also reported more negative observations of parent-child communications than positive observations. Four participants reported exposure to parent education efforts but all perceived these approaches to be inadequate. Recommendations, practical implications, and future avenues of research are discussed

Developing mental toughness: Attributional style retraining in rugby

Recent research has identified optimism as an underlying mechanism of mental toughness (Coulter, Mallett, & Gucciardi, 2010). To further understand what elements of mental toughness can be developed, the current study evaluated the utility of an optimism intervention that employed cognitive-behavioral techniques (e.g., identifying automatic thoughts; testing accuracy of thoughts) to retrain attributional style. Seven male rugby players who were competing in first grade club rugby participated in the intervention. The effectiveness of the program was partially evaluated via self-reports of the Sport Attributional Style Scale (Hanrahan, Grove, & Hattie, 1989). Qualitative data were also collected via a focus group and semi-structured interviews. The quantitative results provided minimal support for the utility of the intervention; there was evidence to suggest participants’ attributions became more external for negative events. The qualitative data suggested that participants (a) developed greater resilience in the face of adversity, (b) were more confident in their sport, and (c) developed a more optimistic explanatory style for negative events. The qualitative findings support the utility of a cognitive-behavioral based attribution retraining intervention for developing optimism in rugby players. The data also supported the flexible use of external attributions for negative events

Perfectionistic profiles among elite athletes and differences in their motivational orientations

Although there is an emerging body of research that has examined perfectionistic clusters in the general population, few studies have explored such profiles in athlete samples. The purposes of this research were to explore perfectionistic profiles within a sample of elite athletes and the differences between them on key motivational variables. A sample of 423 elite athletes (179 males, 244 females) aged between 14 and 66 years (M = 25.64; SD = 8.57) from a variety of team (e.g., rowing, hockey, baseball, rugby) and individual sports (e.g., cycling, athletics, triathlon, gymnastics) completed a multisection questionnaire including measures of sport perfectionism, motivation regulation, achievement goals, and fear of failure. Cluster analyses revealed the existence of three perfectionism profiles, namely, nonperfectionists, maladaptive perfectionists, and adaptive perfectionists. Subsequent analyses generally supported the robustness of these perfectionism profiles in terms of differential motivational orientations (achievement goals, fear of failure, and motivation regulation) in hypothesized directions. Overall, the differences in motivational orientations between the three clusters supported a categorical conceptualization of perfectionism