Introduction: Factors have been identified in association with the psychological adjustment of children and adolescents with Type 1 diabetes such as metabolic control (McDonnell et al., 2007), maternal functioning (Schmidt, 2007) and protective parenting (Mullins et al., 2004). Parenting factors may have an impact on young children (Whittemore et al., 2003; Davis et al., 2001); while other factors such as self-efficacy are important to adolescent patients (Littlefield et al., 1992) as responsibility for diabetes management is gradually transferred from parent to child (Palmer et al., 2004). Many studies have examined family and peer support in the context of adolescents’ capacity to cope with their diabetes (La Greca & Bearman, 2002; Lewandowski & Drotar, 2007), but few have demonstrated the link between diabetes-specific factors for adolescent patients and psychological adjustment in their mothers (Berg et al., 2007). The number of studies on very young patients with Type 1 diabetes is also limited (Grey et al. 1995) in spite of the doubling of incidence of diabetes in children under five years of age in Australia (Taplin et al., 2005). Objective: To examine the child, adolescent and parental factors associated with psychological adjustment and health status in children and adolescents with Type 1 diabetes and their mothers over a post-diagnosis period of 12 months.Method: Sixty-two families of young patients from birth to 18 years of age completed standard measures in a longitudinal analysis on psychological and diabetes-specific variables. Data included child/adolescent measures of adjustment, self-report measures of maternal psychological adjustment, parental protectiveness, maternal separation anxiety, adolescent quality of life, self-efficacy and medical records of metabolic control at the first time point following diagnosis, and repeated at the second time point 12 months post-diagnosis. Results: Increased psychological symptoms in mothers were mildly associated with poor child/adolescent adjustment following diagnosis, and then moderately associated 12 months post-diagnosis. Metabolic control was adequate, although levels declined over time, and adolescent metabolic control was predicted by both maternal and adolescent adjustment. In a separate test, maternal and adolescent adjustment and self-efficacy were associated with quality of life for adolescents. Relatively high levels of maternal separation anxiety and protectiveness were shown; however they were not associated with the other variables. Conclusions: This study highlights the role of mothers in the adjustment of children and adolescents with Type 1 diabetes and the potential risk to the adjustment of a significant minority of young patients and their mothers over time. The influence of maternal adjustment to quality of life and diabetes health status of adolescents was emphasised. Support for families in the first year after diagnosis is indicated.

Research has shown that athletes who sustain injury often experience negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, and depressed mood, and that a negative psychological state can have a detrimental effect on injury rehabilitation and return to sport. For the most part, researchers have focused on athletes who have experienced short to moderate term injuries. Few have addressed long-term injury rehabilitation (LTIR). This thesis focuses on athletes who had experienced season ending injuries. Each athlete (3) was interviewed (four times) and invited to participate in psychological interventions (e.g., psycho-educational and cognitive behavioural) throughout LTIR lasting at least nine months. Athletes’ experiences are reported as long, narrative case studies. While the case studies explore four broad themes (affect, coping, social support, and psychological interventions) the overall narratives articulate the coherence and discord among athletes’ LTIR experiences (e.g., the positive and negative consequences of social support, life stress, pain, affect; the value of psychological interventions; the therapeutic aspect of ‘just’ talking to someone; etc.). The intimate issues identified and lived by each participant are examined and discussed in relation to the pre-existing athletic injury literature. Complex and dynamic relationships among the variables (e.g., emotional and behavioural responses, social factors, and physiological aspects) proposed in integrated models of injury rehabilitation (e.g., biopsychosocial) emerged in these narratives. These integrated models outline the dynamic and interrelated responses athletes have in response to injury and are the maps that practitioners treating these athletes may use. The athletes’ stories presented here, therefore, express some of the common ground injured athletes travel and are also rich and full of unique personal experiences. In both senses, though, they depict the actual, dynamic, rough, and often lonely process of LTIR—they are the real-life territory that those maps only partially describe.

The frequency of all residential fires that are attended by the Melbourne Metropolitan Fire Brigade is routinely recorded and hence well known. However, the frequency of residential fires which are not attended, including instances where the occupant of a dwelling has extinguished the fire or the fire has self-extinguished, has not previously been investigated in an Australian sample. This project includes two studies: in the first study the aim was to develop the Fire Safety Awareness and Experience Interview Schedule and to determine whether the risk factors for attended fires (in which there are fatalities or injuries) are different to the risk factors of residential fires not attended to by the fire brigade. Additionally, the first study aimed to determine the incidence of unattended residential fires by retrospective report from adults since the age of 18. The second study aim was to determine whether correct and regular maintenance behaviours were being carried out by occupants who own a smoke alarm. Five hundred participants, recruited from four shopping centers located in Melbourne, Victoria, completed the Fire Safety Awareness and Experience Interview Schedule. The questionnaire collected information on all residential fire experiences, including attended and unattended fires, since the age 18. Results showed that participants had approximately a 50% chance of experiencing either an attended or unattended residential fire within their adult lifetime; and the mean annual probability of having an unattended fire experience (0.8 fires per 100 adult years) was higher than the probability of having an attended fire experience (0.37 fires per 100 adult years). In addition, of all residential fires in which fire service attendance status was known, the vast majority of fires (78%) were unattended. Results also revealed the vast majority of unattended fires were caused when cooking was left unsupervised by the cook; and oil or food was usually the first material ignited. Of concern is the number of instances in which the unattended fire was extinguished via dangerous actions (i.e. moving the burning object the sink or floor of the home). It is therefore important to educate people on how to safely fight a cooking fire should one occur and occupants should be encouraged to have a fire blanket in an accessible location in their kitchens. Findings from Study Two revealed that the vast majority of the sample (96%) reported owning a smoke alarm. However, over one third of owners are not testing their alarms and 17% are not carrying out battery changes. Overall, the results from this project can be used to help prevent cooking fires in Australia and the developed interview schedule can be used to collect comparison data from other States and Territories. Furthermore, the development instrument can be used to collect unattended home fire data internationally.

Moving away from home to embark on a career at an elite level involves the individual within a broader social ecology where a range of factors influence the dynamic transition. In 2000, Indigenous and non-Indigenous past and present AFL footballers and AFL administrative staff suggested that relocation was one of the issues faced by Indigenous AFL footballers. The focus of the current study was to learn about relocation and settlement experiences from the perspectives of 10 Indigenous Australian AFL footballers, examining the social, cultural, organisational, and psychological challenges. Five participants were drafted to the AFL within 12 months, and five participants were drafted to the AFL prior to 2002. Participants were listed players from seven Victorian AFL clubs. Interviews were also conducted with eight representatives (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) from organisations associated with the AFL. Players were asked questions about their own relocation and settlement experiences. Secondary informants were asked questions about their involvement with Indigenous players relocating and their perception of the relocation process for Indigenous players in the AFL. Interviews were semi-structured and conversational in style and analysed for unique and recurring themes using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Each of the stories reflected subtle differences experienced during relocation, highlighting the importance and value of using a phenomenological and qualitative framework to understand each player’s perspective and experiences of relocation. The findings demonstrated both facilitative and barrier factors influencing the relocation, settlement, and adaptation experiences. These included opportunity and social mobility, social support and kindredness, culture shock, and racism and homogeneity. Each player’s story about relocation and subsequent settlement and adaptation, highlighted the importance of family, connection, and kindredness as an overarching theme. The findings emphasise the need for receiving environments, in this case the AFL, to treat every player on an individual basis rather than grouping them into a collective. It is essential that a player is understood in relation to his socio-cultural context. The AFL has implemented significant changes to welcome cultural diversity, but as a mainstream organisation, it has been developed within mainstream values. Just as society in general needs to acknowledge Australian history and the overall discrepancies between Indigenous and non-Indigenous opportunities and living standards, the AFL has to continue to de-institutionalise stereotypes and increase the cultural awareness of all groups to continue being a forerunner of progressive race relations. The current study represents an important initial step in the identification and description of the relocation processes from the vantage point of Indigenous footballers.

Humans are capable of selecting information that is goal-relevant. Irrelevant (distractor) information, however, typically is not filtered completely and impacts on responses to the goal. Recent theories of selective attention indicate that distractor interference is determined by the perceptual load of a visual display and the availability of cognitive control mechanisms (working memory load). It is unclear however, which mechanisms assist efficient selective attention and how irrelevant distracting information is rejected. Using a go/no-go visual attention task (Experiment 1) and a visual search task (Experiment 2), this series of experiments examined distractor processing in visual selective attention.

Research providing insight into how coaches behave has mainly been sourced from an athlete perspective or from observing and recording coach behaviour in context. Only a few studies have recognized the views of the expert coach as a potentially valuable source of information. Yet only coaches can provide insight into their histories, learning, goals, beliefs, knowledge, and decision making, and decode the complex interactions that occur in the dynamic context of coaching. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate how elite-level coaches developed and used expertise. Twenty successful coaches working with Australian junior, elite sport participants were purposefully sampled to cover a diversity of sports (team and individual) and to provide a gender balance.

This thesis adds a new dimension to the analyses of the sport media nexus by examining the scope of the roles the media adopt during a crisis event in sport. Specifically, this thesis explores the ways in which the print media represents crisis events in sport, how the representation of crisis events is influenced by the organisational and commercial context and the extent to which this representation evolves over time. The thesis is comprised of three case studies: the debate over the South Melbourne Football Club's relocation to Sydney in 1981; the Footscray Fightback campaign to save the Footscray Football Club in 1989; and the Fitzroy Football Club's merger with the Brisbane Football Club in 1996. In each instance the case study is analysed using a theoretical framework of analysis, developed from the literature. As a result of the analyses, a new theoretical framework of analysis for the print media representation of context specific crisis events in sport is proposed.

The purpose of this research project was to provide an in-depth account of elite athletes' experiences of, and experts' perspectives on, overtraining and its negative outcomes. I conducted interviews with athletes and sports experts, including coaches, sport doctors, scientists, and psychologists across a variety of sports. The interviews were focussed on identifying personal and situational risk factors for overtraining behaviours and outcomes. This thesis includes discussions of the responses to the interviews from the athletes' and the experts' perspectives, with distinct approaches to analysing and presenting the interview data from these two groups' different perspectives. For the 14 experts, I carried out inductive content analyses of the interviews and presented the results in a tree-structure showing the major categories, subcategories, and raw data themes emerging from the data. For the 13 athletes, I used a narrative approach to analysing and presenting their stories, which I aggregated into three core tales, represented by three constructed fictional athletes. From the athletes' stories, I found support for the perspectives presented by the experts. I also uncovered, however, unique accounts of overtraining experiences that provided insight into the intra-psychic conflicts, sometimes obsessive-compulsive features, and complicated relationships of the not-as-perfect-as-perceived-to-be athletes. Taken together, both sets of interviews revealed that overtraining behaviours are significant issues in most sports, whether skill- or effort-based, which may go against traditional conceptions of overtraining. In the general discussion, I present a descriptive model of overtraining risks and outcomes, which came together from the synthesis of the athlete and expert interview results, and, finally, I discuss implications for professional practice and make suggestions for future research.

This thesis comprises research that was undertaken between January 2000 and December 2004 into the organizational culture and identity of Fremantle Football Club, a professional sporting organization that competes in an elite national football competition, the Australian Football League. The thesis began with a review of the contemporary literature on the principal topic, organizational culture and identity. The literature was subsequently used to frame and explain the approach taken in the research, which was to explore culture and identity as distinguishable, inter-dependent concepts integral to the functioning of sports organizations. The justification for the need to explore their impact in professional sporting organizations, because of a gap in our knowledge, was also provided. The research was conducted as a single qualitative case study that enabled an in-depth investigation into how Fremantle Football Club's culture and identity were formed and how they influenced its structure, strategy, behaviour and performance. Significantly, the research covered the entire history of the club since its inception in 1994, revealing three distinct periods in which culture and identity were strongly influenced by the values and beliefs of the club's leaders, particularly the CEOs, as well as board members, senior management and coaches. The first period comprised a time of self-absorption with an inappropriate culture that saw it in frequent conflict with external stakeholders as on-field success eluded it. Despite establishing a strong and clearly defined identity, FFC's inward looking culture undermined its capacity to fully engage with its heavily regulated environment. Subsequently, the club became dysfunctional as little was provided by way of long term planning and direction. The second period was epitomised by a club that was heavily fractured by internal disagreements at different levels of its governance that undermined its performance and created a cultural vacuum into which it withdrew. Little progress was made as the club stagnated. Despite consolidating its identity, individualism took precedence over the collective good with scant regard for the direction or well being of the organization. The club emerged into the third period with new personnel at all levels of its leadership and management adopting a different approach to previous administrations. The club ii embarked on a journey of reconciliation with its governing agencies, and adopted an externally engaged perspective that provided the club's stakeholders with a strong sense of its future direction based on consultation and strategic planning. The results of the research show that organizational culture and identity are dynamic, fluid, systems that respond to the value and beliefs of senior leadership. Importantly for this and other sports organizations, the culture and identity are responsive to short term transformation belying previously held notions of cultural change as a long-term process. This was possible for two reasons. Firstly, because FFC was a small organization in terms of staff numbers, the dissemination of transforming values could be more easily achieved. Secondly, because it was a club with a short history, it was more amenable to transformation, with stakeholders using the dismissal of senior coaches as a catalyst for change. The results also show that organizational performance will flourish if both of the following two conditions are met. Firstly, culture and identity are fully aligned with each other and the organization's vision, which enables clearly defined and consistent strategies to emerge. Secondly, the aligned culture, identity and vision are consistent with the external environment enabling the club to fully engage with that environment.

Based on recently proposed definitions (e.g., Hall, 2004; Wang 2002), choking is defined as a critical deterioration in the execution of habitual processes as a result of an elevation in anxiety levels under perceived pressure. The self-focus model of choking (Baumeister, 1984; Beilock & Carr, 2001; Masters, 1992), distraction model of choking (Nideffer, 1992), and recently an integrated model of choking (Wang, 2002) have been proposed to explain choking. Predictors of choking are also relevant in terms of identifying choking-susceptible athletes. Thus, applied sport psychology techniques are important for assisting athletes in countering choking effects. The three interconnected studies in this dissertation were designed to further develop applied sport psychology techniques to predict and alleviate choking. The primary purpose of Study 1 was to investigate whether choking and nonchoking behaviour can be predicted using a battery of psychological inventories. Forty-six experienced netball players completed three psychological inventories and categorised as either choking-susceptible (CS) or choking-resistant (CR). Eight purposively sampled participants then completed a total of 180 netball shots each in a series of single-case A1- B-A2 designs, with the B phase as 'high-pressure' and the A phases as 'low-pressure'. Participants were interviewed upon completion of the netball shooting to investigate cognitions related to choking and non-choking behaviour. Results from Study 1 indicated that established psychological inventories, measuring trait anxiety (A-trait), self-consciousness (S-C), and coping styles, were accurate predictors of non-choking behaviour with the 4 CR athletes. The psychological inventories, however, were less accurate predictors of choking behaviour with the 4 CS athletes (predicting two out of four instances of choking). The 50% success rate is perhaps iii understandable given that even highly CS athletes are likely to experience choking infrequently. Using inductive content analysis, each participant's interview was analysed individually and a cross-case analysis was also included for the CS participants. The interview results indicated that the 2 CS participants who performed poorly under pressure used approach coping strategies, such as information seeking, to manage the pressure situation. Conversely, CR participants typically used avoidance coping strategies, such as blocking out the audience/camera, to cope with the pressure. Overall, the interview results corroborated the findings that the manipulated 'high-pressure' in the B phase resulted in increases in state anxiety (A-state). Furthermore, the interview added valuable detail about how participants responded in the A1-B-A2 phases that generally fitted with the responses from the initial battery of questionnaires. A key finding in Study 1 was that all participants differed substantially in their capacity to absorb competitive pressure and similarly their coping repertoire ranged greatly. Drawing on principles of Nideffer's (1992) distraction model and the qualitative results of Study 1, as foundations, Study 2 was designed to investigate whether a pre-shot routine (PSR) reduced choking effects. Five CS participants were purposively sampled (using the same inventories and selection criteria as Study 1), from 87 participants, to complete ten-pin bowling deliveries in a single-case A1-B1-A2-B2 design with the A phases as 'low-pressure,' and the B phases as 'high-pressure.' Five experienced tenpin bowlers completed at least 180 ten-pin bowling deliveries in a single-case A1-B1-A2-B2 design with the A phases as 'low-pressure,' and the B phases as 'high-pressure.' Three of these participants completed an additional 60 deliveries (totalling 240 deliveries) because they experienced a decrease in performance (i.e., experienced choking) in the B1 phase iv and were instructed to use the planned intervention (i.e., the PSR) prior to the B2 phase. The 3 participants that utilised the PSR improved accuracy in the B2 phase. The interviews, conducted after the 240 deliveries, indicated that choking effects were partially due to an increase in S-A and, in this regard, were similar to the results of Study 1. An increase in S-A coincided with increases in distraction or conscious processing of execution, and thus, provided qualitative support for both the self-focus model and the distraction model of choking. Participants also explained that performance improvements were a result of the PSR minimising S-A during the B2 phase. The reduction in S-A permitted other positive psychological outcomes to occur, including a decrease in the perception of pressure, decreased negative self-talk, increased concentration, and increased confidence. Thus, the PSR produced adaptive and relevant, task-focused attention. In Study 3, music was used as a dual-task intervention under pressure. Similar to Studies 1 and 2, I also re-examined cognitive processes and perceptions of pressure using in-depth interviews. Five purposively sampled CS participants (with selection criteria similar to those used in Studies 1 and 2), from 41 screened basketball players, performed basketball free throws in a single-case A1-B1-A2-B2 design similar to Study 2. Three participants showed evidence of choking by decreasing performance during the B1 phase. These participants were then instructed to listen to the lyrics of a song as an intervention prior to and during the B2 phase. These 3 participants either maintained or improved performance in the B2 phase. Similar to the qualitative results of Studies 1 and 2, participants explained that choking resulted from attention to the audience. Using the music intervention, in the B2 phase, resulted in decreased S-A, enabling participants to decrease explicit monitoring of execution and reducing general distractibility. The results of Study 3 extended the findings of Study 2 by identifying that specific interventions could facilitate performance or ameliorate choking. Based on the results of the three interconnected studies, and previous choking research, choking processes are relatively complex, and differ based on personality characteristics and coping strategies employed. Implications for theory, practitioners and future research on choking are also discussed.