Strengthening the assessment of self‐talk in sports through a multi‐method approach

Abstract

Although self‐talk during competitive sports is common and predictive of athletes' motivation, experiences, and performance, it is difficult to accurately assess self‐talk. An important, yet underexplored, next step in the assessment of self‐talk is to rely on a multi‐method approach. The present study sought to examine whether tennis players' self‐talk assessed either via self‐reports or via a live‐recorded procedure would relate to each other. Competitive tennis players (N = 120; Mage = 25.22; SDage = 9.82) were asked to perform multiple tennis exercises while verbalizing their thoughts, which were audio‐recorded and subsequently coded. Prior to exercise engagement, they indicated their fear of failure, while, after exercise engagement, they reported on their experienced pressure and self‐talk using questionnaires. There was substantial correspondence between the coded and self‐reported measure, allowing the estimation of a latent factor representing a multi‐method assessment of self‐talk. Moreover, in a theory‐consistent way, both latent factors representing negative and positive self‐talk were related to a hypothesized antecedent (ie, fear of failure), with negative self‐talk also relating to a hypothesized consequence (ie, perceived pressure). Overall, the present study shows that athletes' self‐talk can be measured reliably through different methods. Guidelines for the assessment of self‐talk in future research are provided.

Positive and negative spontaneous self-talk and performance in gymnastics: The role of contextual, personal and situational factors

“…Similar to the study of De Muynck et al [54], a second-order principal component analysis (PCA) with Promax rotation was developed to examine the underlying factor structure of selfreported spontaneous sport self-talk and spontaneous self-talk in competition. Two factors emerged for spontaneous sport self-talk, explaining a total of 32.89% of the variance.…”

Athletic Identity and Shoulder Overuse Injury in Competitive Adolescent Tennis Players: The Smash Cohort Study

“…Tennis is one of the most physically challenging individual sports requiring high levels of muscular strength, speed, power, agility, mobility, aerobic fitness, and anaerobic power output during matches in some competitions (König et al, 2001 ). However, tennis is not only about physiology but also the psychological factors become crucial already at a young age due to its competitive structure and the rule of no coaching during matches (De Muynck et al, 2020 ). In addition, injuries are common in elite adolescent tennis players, where injury rates of 1.2–2.8 injuries per 1,000 h played have been reported (Pluim et al, 2016 ; Gescheit et al, 2019 ; Moreno-Perez et al, 2019 ) with an overall yearly injury prevalence of 41% (Kovacs et al, 2014 ).…”

Optimizing Synchronization of Tennis Professional League Live Broadcast Based on Wireless Network Planning

“…Nowadays, live broadcast of the professional league has developed into an important application field of streaming media technology. It has become an indispensable part of sports events because of its rich content and convenient access to information [3].…”