Where is Safeguarding in Sport Psychology Research and Practice?

Recent cases of sexual abuse of athletes have drawn significant concern amongst stakeholders in sport and the public at-large. The fact that the perpetrators in many cases of athlete abuse had numerous victims over the span of several years raises questions of who might have known or suspected that athletes were being harmed. Sexual abuse cases should serve as an impetus for all of us in sport psychology to interrogate our roles and responsibilities as consultants and researchers in the protection of athletes. We propose that future research in applied sport psychology and education of consultants address maltreatment and safeguarding.

Lay Summary: In the following article, we propose that more attention in the research and practice of sport psychology should be devoted to understanding maltreatment of athletes and ways to protect athletes from harm.     

Conceptualizing Excellence: Past,Present, and Future

While an historical glance through the sport psychology literature reveals an interest in performance excellence since its beginning, a focus of personal excellence has been a more recent trend. This review will address the relationships between performance and personal excellence. More specifically, we question whether performance excellence in high-level sport, by virtue of the exceptional demands on the elite athlete, occurs at the expense of development in personal excellence or whether performance excellence is possible only through personal excellence. Furthermore, we propose that the field may reconcile these ideals in the future through an athlete-centered sport model. This model is defined by the philosophy that developmentally appropriate sport can be used as a vehicle for enhancing overall well-being and the acquisition of lifelong skills. Performance excellence, therefore, co-exists in the same environment as personal excellence. The implications of implementing an athlete-centered sport system for athletes and coaches and for the research and practice of those in sport psychology will be addressed.     

Ask,Answer, and Announce: Three stages in perceiving and responding to discrimination

Discrimination towards members of low-status groups takes a variety of forms, and results in a variety of negative consequences for its victims. Furthermore, discrimination may influence its targets either directly (for instance, when housing discrimination makes insurance, mortgage rates, or rents higher for African Americans than for whites) or indirectly, that is via perceptions on the part of the stigmatised. In the latter case the outcomes are caused or amplified by perceptions on the part of the victim that he or she is the target of discrimination. This chapter focuses on current research concerning factors that influence the perception of discrimination and its indirect influence on individuals. We review work from our own lab as well as from the field more broadly, focusing on research that attempts to explain contextual and individual variability in how events that are potentially due to discrimination are initially perceived, subsequently interpreted, and then publicly reported or withheld.     

The Effects of Athlete Retirement on Parents

It is often parents who introduce their children to competitive sports and parents who then provide remarkable emotional and material support across their children's athletic careers (Bloom, 1985 Bloom, B., ed. 1985. Developing talent in young people, New York: Ballantine Books.  [Google Scholar]; Côté, 1999 Côté, J. 1999. The influence of the family in the development of talent in sport. The Sport Psychologist, 13: 395–417. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Considerable research documents athletes’ retirement experiences (Baillie, 1993 Baillie, P. 1993. Understanding retirement from sports: Therapeutic ideas for helping athletes in transition. The Counseling Psychologist, 21: 399–409.  [Google Scholar]; Baillie & Danish, 1992 Baillie, P. and Danish, S. J. 1992. Understanding the career transition of athletes. The Sport Psychologist, 6: 77–98. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Svoboda & Vanek, 1982 Svoboda, B. and Vanek, M. 1982. “Retirement from high level competition”. In Mental training for coaches and athletes, Edited by: Orlick, T., Partington, J. and Salmela, J. 166–175. Ottawa: Coaching Association of Canada.  [Google Scholar]; Werthner & Orlick, 1982 Werthner, P. and Orlick, T. 1982. Retirement experiences of successful Olympic athletes. International Journal of Sport Psychology, 17: 337–363.  [Google Scholar]), yet none explores the effects of retirement on parents. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of athletes’ disengagement from sport on parents. In-depth interviews were conducted with six parents of former female elite gymnasts who had been retired for three to five years and the data analyzed inductively (Côté, Salmela, Baria, & Russell, 1993 Côté, J., Salmela, J., Baria, A. and Russell, S. 1993. Organizing and interpreting unstructured qualitative data. The Sport Psychologist, 7: 127–137. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Lally & Kerr, 2005 Lally, P. S. and Kerr, G. 2005. The career planning, athletic identity and student role identity of intercollegiate student-athletes. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 76: 275–285. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Miller & Kerr, 2002 Miller, P. S. and Kerr, G. 2002. The athletic, academic, and social experiences of intercollegiate student-athletes. Journal of Sport Behavior, 25: 346–367.  [Google Scholar], 2003 Miller, P. S. and Kerr, G. 2003. The role experimentation of intercollegiate student-athletes. The Sport Psychologist, 17: 197–220.  [Google Scholar]). Their daughters’ withdrawal from gymnastics and their own immediate disengagement from the world of elite sport had a tremendous impact on the participants’ personal and social relationships, leaving them struggling with weighty self-doubts over their failure to intervene with abusive coaches.     

A Comparison of the Psychological Entitlement Scale and the Narcissistic Personality Inventory's Entitlement Scale: Relations With General Personality Traits and Personality Disorders

Two studies on the relations between various styles of defense and the power or validity of self-reports on objective personality questionnaires. The power of individual items on the Rotter Internal-External Locus of Control scale to discriminate between subjects defined as internals or externals by a median-cut procedure using the total score was not affected by the presence Or absence of a projective defensive style. However, the presence of repressive tendencies did appear to restrict item power. Prediction from two achievement scales taken from Gough's California Psychological Inventory was not influenced by level of repression, was affected somewhat adversely by a projective style, and was most clearly contaminated by a rationalizing defense. It was proposed that the differential effects of defensive styles upon the validity of personality tests depended upon the convergence or divergence of the cognitive operations involved in the type of defense and in the type of personality measure.     

An Inter-Rater Reliability Study for the Rorschach Performance Assessment System

Summary: Presented definitions for the construct of ambiguity tolerance. The measun: of ambiguity tolerance (MAT-50) had high internal reliability (r = .88) and high test-retest reliability (r = .86) over a 10-to-12 week period. A content analysis of the measure and a subjective imalysis by 20 graduate students indicated adequate content validity. A multivariate comparison with two other ambiguity measures, two rigidity measures, and a short dogmatism measure provided strong evidence for criteria-related validity. Finally, four independent empirical studies showed good construct validity.     

Five-Factor Measure of Borderline Personality Traits

This study provides psychometric data for a new self-report measure of borderline personality traits from the perspective of the Five-factor model (FFM) of general personality. Subscales were constructed in an undergraduate sample (n = 109) to assess maladaptive variants of 12 FFM traits (e.g., Affective Dysregulation as a maladaptive variant of FFM Vulnerability). On the basis of data from a second undergraduate sample (n = 111), the Five Factor Borderline Inventory (FFBI) subscales were shown to have good internal consistency, convergent, discriminant, and incremental validity. These psychometric results were replicated in a clinical sample of female residents at a substance abuse treatment facility (n = 94).