Week 10
Prerna K -
Hey everyone! This week I am going to talk about part 2 of my data analysis!
As said last week, when looking at all the survey responses as a whole, my data as found inconclusive. Because of this. I decided to separate the athletes between sports and analyze if there were any trends within sports. By doing so, I resulted in different sporting categories. The categories were basketball, swim, soccer, volleyball, cross country (XC)/track, football, golf, softball, and racket sports. The graphs for these sport categories had the same axis as the graph seen in my past post, where the x-axis shows competition level and confidence level and the y-axis shows the number of athletes.
Some sports, such as basketball, have it where the highest division had the most number of athletes with the highest confidence, while other sports, such as XC/track, had it where the lowest division had the most number of athletes with high confidence. But once again, because of the small sample size, this may not be a proper representation of whether or not their psychological readiness was impacted based on their competition level. For example, some sports had as little as 1 response, which made those sports outliers, and other sports had up to 15 responses. This further proves that my data was inconclusive as there was not a proper reflection within sports, or within all athletes, of whether the athletes psychological readiness did differ based on different competition levels.
Lastly, I would like to talk about my interview conclusions.
At the end of data collection, I had conducted 10 interviews. Almost all the responses came from athletes playing at the same school, which grouped them into the same competition level. But there were common themes found within responses that showed significance in understanding their psychological readiness. These themes were within their motivations to return, their fear of reinjury, and overall behavior changes surrounding their health.
For motivation to return, athletes claimed that their love for their sport and hope to retain their athletic ability and fitness were a motivation for them to return. For example, an athlete expressed “ I always loved running running and used to do cross country, and when I was doing PT (Physical Therapy), going back into sports was what I used as a motivation and wanted to do a sport for my senior year, and track was the only and best option I had, and I wanted to stay in shape” and another athlete claimed “I feared I would lose my fitness or my ability to play well, so this kept me going to fully recover”. Similar responses were said by the other athletes, whether they were eager to return back to their teammates and the environment, or to regain their abilities.
Fear of re-injury was the most prominent theme amongst all the athletes as it was initially felt by everyone. Essentially what athletes described was when they initially returned, if tensions or stress had arisen around them when playing their sport, they would only be able to focus on their injury. This negatively impacted their overall play, but this ties into the third theme found within athletes of behavior changes surrounding their physical health. As athletes took the time to understand their boundaries and adapt to the fears of re-injury, they were able to strengthen their athletic abilities and grow mindfulness over their physical health. An athlete expressed that “I initially would fear getting hurt again a lot, especially if I landed wrong I would worry. But once I started playing more I understood what to do and now when I play I don’t think about it.” Athletes utilized the feelings they had over fear of re-injury as a motivation to learn more about their physical health, and once again wished to improve their athletic abilities by learning what to do in such scenarios where they feel as if they’re falling behind due to their injury.
Thank you guys!