Cultural sport psychology as a pathway to advances in identity and settlement research to practice

Career development and transitions of athletes: the International Society of Sport Psychology Position Stand Revisited

“…With transnational migration being fairly common in elite development pathway, the need to understand the cultural transition influences on careers has become relevant for the ACD. Researchers started to identify specific stressors and challenges of migrant athletes, such as cultural, linguistic, and structural barriers of acculturation (for reviews see Oghene, Schinke, Middleton, & Ryba, 2017;Schinke, Blodgett, Ryba, Kao, & Middleton, 2019). The sport-related challenges of 'fitting in' the training routines and playing style of the new team were shown to be central to migrant athletes' experience (e.g., Meisterjahn & Wrisberg, 2013;Richardson, Littlewood, Nesti, & Benstead, 2012;Schinke et al, 2016).…”

“…SPPs are encouraged to facilitate newcomers' orientation in the resources at the destination, their positioning in the receiving sporting site, and the reflections and meaning negotiation with the focus on sport performance and well-being. In the sociocultural adaptation phase athletes look more at the present as they search for relatedness and social support within the broader networks (other than sport), and SPPs should augment integration by bridging their past, present, and future in identity work (see more in Ryba et al, 2018;Ryba, Stambulova, & Ronkainen, in press;Schinke et al, 2019).…”

Identity and Cultural Transition: Lessons to Learn from a Negative Case Analysis

“…(b) In contrast to the typical content of identity development interventions promoted through the athlete career discourse (i.e., to prevent or deal with athletic identity foreclosure; see, e.g., Petitpas & France, 2010), practitioners working with migrants often have to deal with "unlocking" their marginalized (e.g., ethnic) identities. (c) To prevent the identity rupture experienced by Jenni, practitioners might also help migrant athletes to understand how identity dimensions intersect (e.g., what are esthetic ideals for an African American woman) and what discursive practices (e.g., playing in a multicultural team, having African American man as a boyfriend) might help to integrate and exercise various identity dimensions (Ronkainen et al, 2016a(Ronkainen et al, , 2016bRyba et al, 2018;Schinke et al, 2019). (d) In working with migrant's environments, it is important to promote an autonomy supportive motivational climate complemented by "shared acculturation" strategies (e.g., opening up to diverse customs, meals, clothing, gender norms, language learning, religious practices, peer mentoring) as a basis for migrants' integration in a culturally safe way (e.g., Ryba et al, 2020;Schinke & McGannon, 2014).…”

“…Cultural transition research and practice are uniquely situated in an overlap between the athlete career and the cultural sport psychology discourses, taking insights from both (Ryba et al, 2018;Stambulova et al, 2020). The theoretical perspectives we are going to use for analyzing Jenni's case include: the whole person approach (e.g., Wylleman, 2019) to direct us to consider Jenni's adjustments in sport and non-sport domains (e.g., studies, social and private life); the athletic career transition model (Stambulova, 2003(Stambulova, , 2017 to facilitate understanding of her transition process as an interplay between transition demands, resources, barriers, and coping strategies influencing the transition pathway and successful or less successful outcomes; the cultural transition model (Ryba et al, 2016) to keep in mind conventional cultural transition phases (pre-transition, acute cultural adaptation, and sociocultural adaptation) and consider how the mechanisms of cultural adaptation (social repositioning, negotiation of cultural practices, and meaning reconstruction) were displayed in Jenni's case; the intersectionality perspective on identity (Ronkainen et al, 2016a(Ronkainen et al, , 2016bSchinke et al, 2019) to trace how various dimensions of Jenni's identity were engaged during the transition process and influenced her adjustment.…”

Towards the athletic psychological adjustment: an empirical study based on the Inverted-U-Type hypothesis

“…The athletes or exercisers need to develop more feasible psychological resilience to achieve better performance [3]. Psychological resilience is defined as a natural or developmental psychological advantage that can often better cope with many of the demands of the sports (competition, training, lifestyle) than the opponent, especially when maintaining firmness, concentration, self-confidence and control of stress [4]. Individual sports, such as archery, are particularly challenging, and their performance will be concentrated and expressive [5,6].…”