Athletic identity: A review and meta-analytic synthesis

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a review of our knowledge of the nature and consequences of athletic identity.Background: Over two decades of research have examined the extent to which athletes of various sports identify as an athlete and the consequences this has for their attitudes and behaviors. Despite the growing research including several reviews on the topic, there remain ambiguities about the precise magnitude of the association between athletic identity and various outcomes, the variability of these relationships (both between studies and between different outcomes), and the factors that amplify and attenuate the strength of these relationships. To address these shortcomings, we provide a review and meta-analytic synthesis of the field.Methods: We reviewed the literature with a particular focus on the most widely used athletic identity scale by Brewer, Van Raalte, and Linder (1993) before extracting the data for all studies that have provided quantitative assessments of the relationship between athletic identity and at least one outcome variable.Conclusions: Preliminary results reveal large variation in the relationship between athletic identity and associated outcomes across studies and contexts. They also indicate that athletic identity tends to have moderately strong positive consequences for several outcomes (e.g., motivation, commitment to the sport). Nevertheless, athletic identity also tends to provide challenges by being associated with a range of other (including some problematic) consequences (e.g., willingness to perform despite injury, adjusting to retirement). The findings shed new light on key characteristics of the nature and consequences of athletic identity.

Jaar van publicatie:2019