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The holistic ecological approach to talent development in sport highlights the central role of the overall environment as it affects a prospective elite athlete. This paper examines a flat-water kayak environment in Norway with a history of successfully producing top-level senior athletes from among its juniors. Principal methods of data collection include interviews, participant observations of daily life in the environment and analysis of documents. The environment was centered around the relationship between prospects and a community of elite athletes, officially organized as a school team but helping the athletes to focus on their sport goals, teaching the athletes to be autonomous and responsible for their own training, and perceived as very integrated due to a strong and cohesive organizational culture. We argue that the holistic ecological approach opens new venues in talent development research and holds the potential to change how sport psychology practitioners work with prospective elite athletes.

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This study examined cross-cultural differences between Russian and British children’s physical self-perceptions and physical activity levels. The relationship between physical self-perceptions and physical activity behavior was also investigated. Two hundred and fifty-two Russian children (118 boys, 134 girls) and 240 British children (113 boys, 127 girls) aged 13 to 14 years completed Whitehead and Corbin’s (32) Physical Self-Perception Profile for Children (PSPP-C) and the leisure time exercise questionnaire (11). Results showed that boys from both nationalities were significantly more active than their female counterparts, and Russian boys participated in more moderate intensity activity than British girls. Multisample confirmatory factor analyses revealed that Russian and British children appraised the PSPP-C subdomains in similar ways, but the fit of the data to the hypothesized model was unsatisfactory. Russian children exhibited gender differences on all of the PSPP-C subdomains, but there was only one gender difference for the body-attractiveness subdomain in British children.

This case study in Danish swimming was informed by a holistic ecological approach in talent development and aimed to explore (a) collaborative relationships between the Danish swimming federation, a municipality, and a local swimming club, termed “an organizational triangle,” and (b) factors influencing the success of their collaboration at the local level. Data collection and analysis were guided by the athletic-talent-development-environment (working) model and a newly developed collaboration-success-factors (CSF) model. Methods included interviews with talent-development coordinators representing the organizations and analysis of documents. Results allowed the authors to transform the CSF (working) model into an empirical model containing the collaboration preconditions (e.g., power to make decisions), processes (e.g., strategic planning), and initiatives (e.g., efficient use of the swimming pool) and shared assumptions of the talent-development philosophy (e.g., long-term focus). The success of this organizational triangle was visible in the way the organizations increased the quality of talent development in the local swimming club.

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This study examines the generalizability of the form, structural parameters, and latent means of a hierarchical multidimensional model of physical self-perceptions in adolescents from three cultures. A children's version of the physical self-perception profile (PSPP-C) was administered to samples of British, Hong Kong, and Russian high school students. A structural equation model that hypothesized a hierarchical structure with global self-esteem as a super ordinate construct and physical self-worth as a domain-level construct governing the PSPP-C subdomains fit the data adequately. Tests of the cross-cultural generalizability of the proposed model supported the invariance of the factor pattern and model parameters across the samples. Latent means analysis suggested that the factor means were significantly higher in the British sample, a finding that supports the results of cross-cultural studies of self-esteem in other domains.