About this srcd poster session

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Panel information
Panel 20. Social Cognition

Abstract

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During the transition from late adolescence into early adulthood, participation in sports is believed to decline precipitously. New scholarship highlights some of the problems associated with this claim (Battaglia et al., 2024). Certainly, intercollegiate sports are more competitive than interscholastic sports but changing participation levels may be more accurately understood if multiple indicators of participation were more widely available. As part of a broader research program on how individuals learn to participate in society, we have been validating new tools for capturing individuals’ reasoning about their involvement in sport. Evidence that sports heroes elevate the human spirit by reminding us of aspirations and ideals as well as paradoxical findings from psychological studies of heroism (Franco et al., 2011) offers insight into how adolescents and young adults might overcome the types of approach-avoidance conflict that minimize sports participation. Athletes are simultaneously elevated and negated as heroic actors while spectators watch them compete at local, national, and global levels (Markovits & Rensmann, 2010). Such dialogues include the detection of key heroic virtues worthy of emulation and the use of such virtues to critique one’s own behavior and the behavior of others.

To determine if adolescents and young adults participate in such dialogues, we tested an intentional model comprised of sports-focused approach-avoidance conflict, aspirations to emulate heroic virtues, and individual and team-level competence orientations. The resulting intentional model was generated in three steps. After verifying that demographic diversity explained no variance in any analyses, we confirmed that volunteers’ (n=245, 147 females, ages 16-26) pleasure in sport was associated with their heroic aspirations but not their anti-heroic or paradoxical aspirations to participate in sport (adj R2=.08, F(3,241)=8.29, p<.001). Then, a more complex, hierarchical model confirmed that sport-related approach-avoidance conflict was associated with sports enjoyment, before conveying that heroic aspirations and competence orientations toward individual and team sport added additional explanatory power to this intentional model (Table 2). The resulting intentional model offers one means of better assessing why some individuals simultaneously embrace and avoid sports. Repeating such assessments over time as individuals transition from late adolescence into early adulthood could better document how performance anxiety constrains continued sports participation. Such efforts also invite more youth into conversations about how sports help to reshape culture and global politics.

Author information

Author	Role
Dr. Theresa A. Thorkildsen, Ph.D., University of Illinois Chicago	Presenting author
Logan Wyers, University of Illinois Chicago	Non-presenting author
Jodie Duncan, University of Illinois Chicago	Non-presenting author

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