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Performance development of adolescent athletes : a Mindfulness - Acceptance - Commitment (MAC) approach

This study explored the subjective interpretations of five adolescent athletes who
experienced a sport-specific version of the Mindfulness-Acceptance-Commitment
(MAC) approach. The MAC approach is an alternative sport psychology intervention
to more traditional control-driven approaches, such as Psychological Skills Training
(PST). An in-depth qualitative study was conducted at the High Performance Centre
(hpc) of the University of Pretoria (UP). The sport-specific MAC programme was
developed for the sport of athletics. The programme was facilitated to five
adolescent athletes who participate in the sport of athletics. Semi-structured
interviews were conducted after the participants experienced the programme. The
interviews were based on written reflections provided by participants during the
programme. The research position for this study was phenomenology, and
specifically Interpretive Phenomenology (IP). Interpretive Phenomenological
Analysis (IPA) was used to analyse the material. The results revealed that there was
only one theme that was common to all five participants. Furthermore, the results
portrayed diversity amongst the participant experiences and subjectivity in their
interpretations of the MAC approach. The results displayed how some themes are
consistent with MAC-related literature, and how other themes contradict the
literature. Additionally, some themes have not been reported in MAC literature
before. Thus, the study contributed to the expansion of literature on the MAC
approach. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / lk2014 / Psychology / MA / Unrestricted

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:up/oai:repository.up.ac.za:2263/43328
Date January 2013
CreatorsDykema, Ellie
ContributorsHuman, Lourens H., elliedykema@gmail.com
PublisherUniversity of Pretoria
Source SetsSouth African National ETD Portal
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeDissertation
Rights© 2014 University of Pretoria. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of Pretoria. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the University of Pretoria.

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