More than half of adolescents in the United States participate in organized sports (Kann et al., 2014); however, the United States Olympic Committee (USOC; 2016) found that recently increasing rates of athlete dropout were associated with poor coping skills. Before sports leaders and coaches can successfully implement trainings and programs aimed to improve athletes’ coping effectiveness, researchers must first examine the coping processes of youth athletes in order to then inform the development of evidence-based interventions (Folkman & Moskowitz, 2004). To better conceptualize and understand coping among youth athletes, this dissertation studied 310 youth volleyball athletes immediately following a High Performance tryout. The athletes were compared across gender (male vs. female) and skill level (less-skilled vs. more-skilled) regarding their self-reported coping experience according to the following target variables: problem-focused coping, emotion-focused coping, avoidance-focused coping, stress appraisal, perceived controllability, perceived coping effectiveness, and performance self-rating. Correlational analyses revealed perceived controllability was significantly associated with coping function across the entire sample, such that greater perceived controllability was associated with more problem-focused coping, more emotion-focused coping, and less avoidance-focused coping. A 2x2 MANOVA comparing the target variables across gender and skill level revealed a significant main effect for gender, but the interaction and main effect for skill level were not significant. Post-hoc analyses indicated that males were more likely to use avoidance-focused coping compared to females. Finally, regression analyses were conducted to examine whether coping function (i.e., problem-focused, emotion-focused, or avoidance-focused), perceived controllability, and the interaction between these two variables predicted perceived coping effectiveness and performance self-rating, respectively. None of the interactions were significant, indicating that the relationships between coping function and perceived coping effectiveness were not moderated by perceived controllability; this was also true for the models predicting performance self-rating. Therefore, the interaction terms were excluded from the regression analyses, and the adjusted models indicated that greater perceived controllability, problem-focused coping, and emotion-focused coping predicted greater perceived coping effectiveness. Greater perceived controllability also predicted higher performance self-rating. Taken together, these results suggest some differences in coping according to gender and skill level. The results also suggest that youth athletes may not conceptualize effective coping according to Folkman’s (1991; 1992) matching hypothesis of the goodness-of-fit model of coping effectiveness. This dissertation’s findings have important implications for future research examining coping in sport as well as for the development and implementation of mental skills training programs for youth athletes. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2018. / April 30, 2018. / coping, stress appraisal, youth sport / Includes bibliographical references. / Martin Swanbrow Becker, Professor Directing Dissertation; Karen Randolph, University Representative; Steven Pfeiffer, Committee Member; Graig Chow, Committee Member.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_647238 |
| Contributors | Hess, Colleen Thomas (author), Becker, Martin Swanbrow (professor directing dissertation), Randolph, Karen A. (university representative), Pfeiffer, Steven I. (committee member), Chow, Graig Michael (committee member), Florida State University (degree granting institution), College of Education (degree granting college), Department of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems (degree granting departmentdgg) |
| Publisher | Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, text, doctoral thesis |
| Format | 1 online resource (129 pages), computer, application/pdf |
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