<p dir="ltr">Resilience processes, which are largely communicative in nature, are vital to the wellbeing and success of athletic personnel and organizations both individually and collectively. However, the communicative components of resilience-building have been largely ignored in sport scholarship and in practice. This dissertation seeks to bridge that gap by developing an in-depth understanding of how collegiate athletes and coaches on the same team experience resilience, including how they talk about, understand, and enact resilience. Recognizing the lack of explicit attention paid to the function of communication in resilience-building, this dissertation uses the communication theory of resilience and language convergence/meaning divergence theory as sensitizing concepts to understand communicative resilience processes and uncover illusions of shared meaning about resilience-building in athletics. This dissertation adopts an interpretive-constructivist approach, examining resilience as communicatively and collectively constructed. The data for this dissertation was collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews with members of a Division I college baseball team and analyzed using thematic co-occurrence analysis. Findings indicate that collegiate athletes and coaches experience resilience as either a trait or a process involving the possession or development of mental toughness (i.e., persistence and discipline) and resourcefulness (i.e., social support, vulnerability, (self-)reflection, and positive self-talk). Findings also revealed three meaningful relationships between co-occurring themes. First, participants who focused on the process of persistence and detached from the results of their efforts developed greater (self-)awareness and found better solutions to the issues they faced. Second, providing social support to other network members motivated participants to regulate their own emotions and to be more disciplined amid adversity. Third, participants who communicated their vulnerability were empowered to actively seek out social support as a partial solution to disruptive events. Finally, findings revealed illusions of shared meaning related to participants’ understandings of the process-based orientation to resilience and the term persistence. In both cases, divergences of meaning centered on participants’ emphasis on versus detachment from results. These findings demonstrate the communicative and collective nature of resilience processes and inform suggestions for resilience-building in athletics.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/27095869 |
| Date | 24 September 2024 |
| Creators | Lillian B Feder (6596906) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Rights | CC BY 4.0 |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/Toward_a_Refined_Conceptualization_of_Resilience_in_Sport_A_Language_Convergence_Meaning_Divergence_Case_Study/27095869 |
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