In today's uncertain, fluid job market, transnational mobility has intensified. Though the concept of cultural transition is increasingly used in sport and career research, insight into the processes ...of how individuals produce their own development through work and relationships in shifting cultural patterns of meaning remains limited. The transnational industry of sports, in which athletes' psychological adjustment to cultural transitions has implications for both performance and meaningful life, serves as a backdrop for this article. This study applied the life story method to interviews with 15 professional and semi-professional athletes, focusing particularly on the cultural transition aspect of their transnational athletic careers. The aims of the study were to identify the developmental tasks of cultural transitions and strategies/mechanisms through which cultural transitions were enacted. Three underlying mechanisms of the transition process that assisted athletic career adaptability were social repositioning, negotiation of cultural practices, and meaning reconstruction. Based on the data analyses, a temporal model of cultural transition is proposed. The results of this research provide professionals working in the fields of career counseling and migrant support with a content framework for enhancing migrant workers' adaptabilities and psychological wellbeing.
Youth sport is habitually promoted as an important context for learning that contributes to a person's broader development beyond sport-specific skills. A growing body of research in this area has ...operated within a life skills discourse that focuses on useful, positive and decontextualised skills in the production of successful and adaptive citizens. In this paper, we argue that the ideological discourse of life skills, underpinned by ideas about sport-based positive youth development, has unduly narrowed the research on learning in sport to only what is deemed functional, teachable, and economically productive. After considering the problems associated with the currently dominant life skills approach, we explore existential learning as an alternative perspective on conceptualising and studying learning in sport. An existential approach provides a non-instrumental theory of learning with an emphasis on discontinuity, relational self and 'becoming', opening an avenue for exploring various forms of informal learning under-explored in sport. We discuss the applications of this alternative approach for future research and practice in learning in youth sport.
Involvement in sport and exercise not only provides participants with health benefits but can be an important aspect of living a meaningful life. The COVID-19 pandemic and the temporary cessation of ...public life in March/April/May 2020 came with restrictions, which probably also made it difficult, if not impossible, to participate in certain types of sport or exercise. Following the philosophical position that different types of sport and exercise offer different ways of "relating to the world," this study explored (dis)continuity in the type of sport and exercise people practiced during the pandemic-related lockdown, and possible effects on mood. Data from a survey of 601 adult exercisers, collected shortly after the COVID-19 outbreak in Finland, were analyzed. Approximately one third (35%) of the participants changed their "worldmaking" and shifted to "I-Nature"-type activities. We observed worse mood during the pandemic in those who shifted from "I-Me," compared to those who had preferred the "I-Nature" relation already before the pandemic and thus experienced continuity. The clouded mood of those experiencing discontinuity may be the result of a temporary loss of "feeling at home" in their new exercise life-world. However, further empirical investigation must follow, because the observed effect sizes were small.
Against a theoretical backdrop of narrative career construction, this article argues for the cultural constitution of life-designing processes in and through sport. A narrative case study approach is ...used to explore the culturally infused, gendered construction of elite athletic careers from the life story perspective. One Finnish, male, professional hockey player (age 29) and one Baltic, female, amateur orienteer (age 27) participated in a series of three individual interviews, generating approximately five interview hours per athlete. Both participants drew upon the performance narrative plot of an exemplary athletic career to make sense of their sporting experiences, life choices, and career behaviors. Further analysis of gendered career narrations in the context of participants' lives extended contextualized understandings of career practices, discursive resources and cultural constraints of the life design at a particular socio-historical juncture. The present study elucidates the complex social, cultural, and gendered underpinnings of athletic career, as well as the ways in which agentic individuals create novel meanings in bringing authenticity to their life through the athletic pursuit.
•We examined the cultural context underlying career construction in elite sports.•A performance narrative provided the structure of meanings for career identity.•Athletic career practices were culturally and historically constituted.•Individuals deconstructed and created novel meanings in the process of living authentically through the athletic career.
A number of studies have investigated career pathways in elite sport with retrospective designs, but few studies have explored how youth elite athletes construct narratives about their future lives ...and how their dreams and hopes relate to their careers in sport and other life contexts. We drew on career construction theory to understand youth elite athletes' dreams for the future and prominent life themes. Seventeen Finnish youth elite athletes (7 men, 10 women) in the first year of upper secondary sport school participated in the study. They were asked to make visual representations of their “dream days”, and these were used as aids for reflection in low-structured interviews where participants were invited to tell a story about the best possible day sometime in the future. The data were analysed using thematic and structural narrative analysis. We identified three types of dream days: a day on holiday, focused on relaxation, having a good time with friends, and recreational activities; a day of peak athletic performance describing winning a major competition; and a regular day involving school or work, athletic training and time with family. We concluded that the short future timespan and a low number of sporting dream days might indicate overload and lack of time for reflection. The implications for career interventions with talented adolescents are discussed.
•We explored student-athletes' future perspectives through visual narratives.•Three types of dream days were holiday, peak performance day, and regular day.•Athletes had a short future timespan.•Dream days focused on having a break can be a sign of overload.
A characterising trait of qualitative research, as opposed to quantitative research, is its assumed focus on meaning. For example, Smith and Sparkes (2016, p. 2) suggested that “To interpret ...phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them, qualitative researchers draw on a variety of empirical materials”. Although there might be an intuitive understanding of what “meaning” means, different traditions of qualitative research have unique ways of conceptualising where meaning is located and how it might best be studied. In this presentation, we will explore three qualitative traditions – phenomenology, narrative inquiry and cultural analysis – to explicate these different assumptions and how they influence the qualitative research process. Firstly, we will focus on phenomenological approaches to qualitative research which often emphasise the lived, pre-verbal experience of meaning before it is crystallised into words. From this perspective, the challenge for the qualitative research is to help the participants to explicate meanings of their experience through careful questioning. Secondly, we explore narrative approaches that consider meaning as created through storytelling and co-constructed with the researcher with particular audiences in mind. From this perspective, meaning is personal, but constructed from the cultural building blocks of example stories that are available to the storyteller. Finally, in cultural analysis, the focus is not on personal meaning, but rather the culturally shared webs of significance that make meaningful actions possible for cultural insiders. We conclude that explicating the types of assumptions that researchers draw on in the study of meaning can enhance the quality of qualitative research, and that the diverse perspectives often lead to complementary, enriching understandings of meaning in the world of sport and physical culture.
References
Smith, B., & Sparkes, A. C. (Eds.). (2016). Routledge Handbook of Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise. Routledge.
Meaning in movement is an enduring topic in sport social sciences, but few studies have explored how sport is meaningful and for whom. The authors examined the relationships between demographic ...variables, meaningfulness of sport, and craftsmanship. Athletes ( N = 258, 61.6% male, age ≥18) from the United Kingdom completed a demographic questionnaire, the Work and Meaning Inventory modified for sport, and the Craftsmanship Scale. Older age and individual sport significantly correlated with higher craftsmanship. Craftsmanship and religion were two independent predictors of meaningfulness, but emphasized somewhat different meaning dimensions. Meaningfulness in sport seems to be related to how athletes approach their craft, as well as their overall framework of life meaning.
The aim of this meta-study is to provide a critical synthesis of qualitative research on athletic identity in sport psychology. A total of 108 empirical studies were identified, including 63 ...quantitative studies, 40 qualitative studies, and five mixed methods studies. Qualitative and mixed methods studies were reviewed with the meta-study method, which involves a meta-analysis in terms of theoretical perspectives, methodologies, and findings. In our discussion we focus on evaluating and critiquing the current status of qualitative research on athletic identity and outlining recommendations for improving methodological rigor. It is concluded that both quantitative and qualitative studies need to be more explicit about their philosophical underpinnings and better grounded in psychological identity theory.
This study explores gendered experiences of the mastery stage in endurance runners' athletic careers in terms of (a) key themes in this period of life, (b) retirement decision-making and (c) changes ...in athletic and runner identities.
Ten male and nine female athletes aged between 25 and 62 participated in individual interviews. The data were analyzed via thematic narrative analysis.
Gendered meanings permeate career decision-making and retirement patterns of Finnish runners. Female athletes reported many difficulties, including health problems, loneliness, societal pressure and lack of social support during the final years of their careers. These aspects were important reasons for them to start considering retirement from sport. Male athletes reported less social pressure and suggested that friendship in sport was a major reason for postponing retirement. Male athletes expressed more interest for coaching others, wherein women perceived themselves as incompetent and/or lacked time and interest for it. Running remained important for the majority of athletes after retirement and they anticipated or had continued regular running post-retirement.
•We examined Finnish distance runners' experiences of the mastery stage of athletic career.•The study contributes to understanding of gendered construction of elite athletic careers.•Qualitative interviews were analyzed with thematic narrative analysis.•Women struggled with injuries and loneliness whereas men developed relational narratives in sport.•This cultural praxis study seeks to instill practical changes in elite running culture in Finland.
The present study explored how the organizational cultural experiences of elite youth footballers shaped their identity development and behavior. The first author occupied the position of sport ...psychology practitioner-researcher within 1 professional football club over 3 years. Traditional ethnographic research methods were employed, including observations, field notes, reflections, and informal interviews. A cultural sport psychology perspective on identity as a social construction and research on the cultural characteristics of professional football were used as frameworks to make sense of the data. Despite the introduction of the Elite Player Performance Plan in 2012, the traditional masculine culture of professional football dominated the studied club. Creative nonfiction vignettes revealed that youth players were encouraged to develop their self-stories focused on a single-minded dedication to professional football. The limited identity-related resources offered at both club and cultural level are detrimental for players in terms of their well-being and long-term psychological development. From the results of this study, we suggest that future sports psychology practice within professional football may best be delivered at an organizational level. However, for sport psychologists to be effective in this role, they must develop an understanding of the subcultural features and characteristics of the organization. In line with this, there would be great value in introducing a focus on organizational culture within sport psychology professional training and education routes.
Lay Summary: This paper explores the impact of the professional football culture on the psychological development of elite youth footballers. From the findings we suggest that sport psychology should be delivered at an organisational level.
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