What Would Kim Do: A Choice Study of Projected Athlete Doping Considerations

Abstract

This paper reports on an empirical discrete choice model of the factors influencing a hypothetical athlete’s deliberations around using prohibited performance enhancing substances (doping) developed from a sample of 259 elite Australian athletes (76% Australian, Worlds or Olympic). Kim was constructed as a gender neutral athlete at the same level and stage of career as the respondent. The results indicate athletes felt Kim would be more at risk of considering doping if convinced by a coach or senior athlete of disproportionate immediate gains to performance with little or no consequences (e.g., low risk of prosecution). Conversely, athletes indicated Kim was felt to be less inclined to consider doping if doping would be fatal, to achieve or maintain performance, large fines ($150,000) or no financial gain. The choice model also indicates elite athletes’ projections about doping considerations were rational in character. The implications for managing the role of drugs in sport suggest antidoping could be improved with precisely timed testing, changing incentive structures within sport, concealing test accuracy and publicly humiliating athletes caught doping.

Doping in sport: Whose problem is it?

“…There were wide variations in the type of athlete studied (e.g., cyclists only, bodybuilders only, youth male athletes, university athletes, doping athletes only); the other two articles sampled support staff (one article) and former and current administrators, managers, and directors (one article). Primary data-driven articles used both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, although there was only one survey (Woolf et al, 2014) and one experimental study (Huybers & Mazanov, 2012 Overall, we found no dominant conceptual or theoretical frameworks. Two articles were primarily psychological, or were premised on psychological and social psychological theories Woolf et al, 2014); other theoretical frameworks included social ecology theory (Smith et al, 2010); Bourdieu's (1993) conceptual framework of social field, capital and habitus (Stewart et al, 2011); figurational sociology and game models (Hanstad, 2008); and phenomenology (Probert & Leberman, 2009).…”

“…There were five articles in European Sport Management Quarterly (Hanstad, 2008;Probert & Leberman, 2009;Tainsky & Winfree, 2008;Wagner, 2010Wagner, , 2011. Two articles were in both the Journal of Sport Management (Huybers & Mazanov, 2012;Woolf, Rimal, & Sripad, 2014) and the International Journal of Sport Management and Marketing (Christiansen, 2010;Denham, 2007) Half (eight) of the articles used primary data; one of these articles (Hanstad, 2008) also employed secondary data, including document and media analysis. Of the eight primary data articles, six featured athletes or athletic populations.…”

Experiences, attitudes and trust: an inquiry into elite athletes’ perception of the whereabouts reporting system

“…The majority of athletes surveyed in these studies thought that doping tests acted as a deterrent and believed the sanctions/penalties to be of appropriate severity (Striegel et al 2002, Waddington et al 2005, Dunn et al 2010. Moreover, athletes' assessments of the likelihood of being caught doping and subsequently prosecuted acted as a deterrent in athletes' decisions whether or not to dope (Mazanov and Huybers 2010, Guccirardi et al 2011, Huybers and Mazanov 2012. However, other studies showed that moral beliefs and health concerns (Strelan and Boeckmann 2006) or fear of shame (Bloodworth and McNamee 2010) were sometimes regarded as more important deterrents by elite athletes than doping tests or legal sanctions.…”

Self-Regulatory Mechanisms of Doping Intentions in Elite Athletes: The Role of Self-Determined Motivation in Sport

“…Affective self-regulatory efficacy: Affective self-regulatory efficacy was evaluated using the items from the French version of the Social Skills Rating System (SSRS) [35][36][37][38], which was adapted to the sports context while preserving the highest semantic similarity to the original version. Sixteen items measured self-efficacy to regulate positive affect (5 items; e.g., "I feel capable of expressing my joy when positive things happen to me") and negative affect (12 items; e.g., "I feel capable of controlling myself when I am angry") on a Likert scale from "Not at all capable" (1) to "Completely capable" (6).…”

“…Scenarios have been used in previous doping research [13,35] because they do not require athletes to reveal their true behavior and can refer to various doping situations [16]. We based our approach on both the series of scenarios developed by Zelli et al [15] and the items used to measure doping intentions in past research [3,36].…”