Assessment (EMA) is a real-time data capture strategy designed to repeatedly and intensively sample a phenomenon of interest in the context of everyday life. EMA approaches are increasingly being used to study human behavior in psychology, public health, and related disciplines; however, its use with competitive athletes has been somewhat limited despite its promise for answering novel questions in applied sport psychology. In this article, we provide sport psychology scholars with a practical guide for implementing EMA in research with athletes. Specifically, our purpose is to (a) provide a general overview of EMA; (b) present an empirical example to illustrate how EMA can be used to better understand the etiology and consequences of athlete behavior and performance; (c) discuss challenges of conducting EMA research with athletes; and (d) recommend strategies for designing, implementing, and reporting EMA studies. Incorporating EMA approaches in sport psychology research can promote refinement of theory and inform the development of adaptive interventions that integrate new technology and real-time personalized feedback to athletes.
Sport psychology scholars have long called for the field to take intersectional approaches to research and applied practice. Missing from this call is the study of intersectionality in the classroom. Therefore, the purpose of this practice paper is to provide a resource for sport psychology practitioners to take an intersectional approach in their teaching. First, the author provides a brief overview of intersectional theory and approaches to using anti-oppressive practices in the classroom. The author then reflects on their experience utilizing an intersectional lens as a neophyte instructor. Finally, the author discusses lessons learned from this teaching experience. This practice paper serves as a resource for sport psychology scholars and practitioners to integrate the study of intersectionality in their roles. While this paper is written for the higher education classroom, all readers will gain knowledge on intersectional theory and how it can be integrated in their scholarship or applied practice.
There is growing interest in how athletes’ physical activity participation may be impacted when they transition out of competitive sport; however, few studies have examined the process of physical activity transitions in collegiate student-athletes using a qualitative approach. The purpose of our study was to explore student-athletes’ perceptions of, and experiences with, physical activity in the transition out of collegiate sport. Our analysis of transcripts from 13 focus groups conducted with current and former student-athletes (n = 59) suggests that student-athletes experienced a journey from control to liberation as they transitioned into their postcompetitive lives. In this exciting yet challenging transitional journey, participants were faced with navigating newfound autonomy over their physical activity outside of the controlled environment of collegiate sports and were considering the value and meaning of physical activity within a health promoting context. We offer practical recommendations from these findings to support student-athletes in this transition.
In recent years, sport psychology professionals (SPPs) have recognized the importance of being aware of culture in their scholarly and applied practice. However, there is still a discrepancy between this recognition and the apparent implementation of these cultural lenses in sport psychology (SP). With this study, we aimed to explore and understand the perceived experiences of SPPs of the challenges faced while integrating and implementing culture in their scholarly and applied practice. Grounded in a critical realist philosophical framework, we conducted a study using semistructured interviews and a consensual qualitative research (Hill, 2012) methodological approach to analyze the data. We interviewed 25 globally situated SPPs (13 males and 12 females) with approximately 18 years (17.83, SD = 10.88) of professional experience. We developed two main domains: (a) SP as a culturally challenged field and (b) personal challenges to cultural SP practice. Although these SPPs acknowledged the importance of culture in developing and implementing SP research studies and applied interventions, they also recognized how most scholarship and applied practices are still founded in Westernized ethnocentric philosophical assumptions. These SPPs also shared their perceived experience of the challenges faced while integrating culture into their professional practice and scholarship; how, early in their careers, they struggled with accepting their own limits, biases, and the impossible task of developing prescribed universal cultural competence applicable across people and contexts. Their perceived experiences support the recent call for more culturally grounded research and applied practice (Ryba et al., 2013). Recommendations for future investigation are also discussed.
Heeding recent calls to capture dynamic variability of physical activity (PA) motivation within a self-determination theory framework, this study examined the extent to which psychological needs satisfaction in PA predicted subsequent PA, disaggregating within-person and between-persons data. University students (N = 89) wore an ActiGraph GT3X accelerometer for 6 days and reported basic psychological needs satisfaction daily. Multilevel models examined whether competence, autonomy, and relatedness for the previous day’s PA (>2,020 counts per minute) predicted the following day’s minutes of PA (>2,020 counts per minute), controlling for previous-day PA. Participants who, on average, reported greater feelings of autonomy and competence tended to engage in more minutes of PA the following day. When participants reported feeling greater relatedness than what was typical for them, they tended to engage in more PA the following day. Psychological needs vary day to day, but how and to what extent they predict PA depends on the specific need.
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