The purpose of this thesis was to examine the impact of life stress and skating specific stress on the performance of figure skaters. Two separate experiments were conducted to examine this relationship during two different time frames--the first transpired during the summer skating season and the latter was conducted during the fall skating season. Thirty-one and thirty competitive figure skaters participated in experiments one and two, respectively. Repeated measures of daily hassles and skating specific stress were obtained as well as single assessments of major life stress, social support and coping abilities. Practice performance for both studies was assessed by the coaches. Competitive performance was also assessed by the coaches in both experiments, but an added feature of the second study was the judges' scores. The findings revealed that during the summer, stress did not negatively impact either type of performance, whereas in the second study, strong negative correlations and predictions were obtained. Both studies found that task coping predicted greater performance levels. These results are discussed in terms of the significance of the time of year studied, as well as the implications for psychological interventions and future research.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/4491 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Prakash, Kavita. |
| Contributors | Ste-Marie, D., |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 146 p. |
Page generated in 0.0335 seconds