In these modern days, everyone talks about stress and often faces up to stress in our daily life. Because of this phenomenon of increasing stress, the academic interest of "The Relationships between Human and Stress" have grown up. The common subject...
In these modern days, everyone talks about stress and often faces up to stress in our daily life. Because of this phenomenon of increasing stress, the academic interest of "The Relationships between Human and Stress" have grown up. The common subjects of "The Stress Study" include psychological, physiological, behavioral reactions to stress, the acute sources of stress, and various stress-coping styles. There is no exception in sport science filed so that many studies about "Competitive Athletes' Stress Research" have been made by sport psychologists in last decade. However, stress studies about professional athletes did not attract much attention.
Hence, the purpose of this qualitative case study were to explore sources of performance-related stress, stress-coping styles of professional tennis players. In addition, this case study investigates how players feel the stress outside tennis court.
10 professional tennis players participated in this study, 6 from Korea, and 4 from three different countries in Asia. This study took three months to investigate sources of stress and stress-coping styles of professional tennis players and to comprehend how those stress matters to the matches, and also how players perceived stress. All 6 Korean participants were asked for semi-structured in-depth-interview. All interviews were processed by standard interview format, which involved participants being taken through identical set of questions and being asked them in a similar manner. Other 4 overseas' participants were asked to fill up open-ended questionnaire. Contents of both semi-structured in-depth-interview and open-ended questionnaire were identical.
After correcting all data, the details of Korean participants' interviews were transcribed and oversea participants' answers were translated to Korean. In this stage, all stress-related words were encode and stored. Afterward, all codes were merged to thematic primes, and categorized.
The result of this study indicates that professional tennis players have experienced psychological, physiological, personal, and environmental issues of stress. To deal with stress, participants mostly use psychological method, active coping, social support, detachment, and avoidance coping. Most frequently cited themes were related to the pressure of drop in the world ranking, win/lost record, and poor performance.
5 of 10 player regarded stress as harmful and the other 5 regarded stress as both useful and harmful. Moreover 8 of 10 professional tennis players answered stress affected on their performance on the competitions; lost of concentration, coward play, and injuries.
This study extends prior research examining stress and coping styles of competitive athletes. Research showed that professional tennis players often faced up to psychological, physiological, personal, and environmental stress without regard to their culture, world ranking and gender difference. They also use various kinds of stress-coping strategies such as psychological method, active coping, social support, detachment, and avoidance coping. Thus, the result of this study furnished an opportunity to explore sources of stress and stress-coping styles of professional tennis players. In addition, it is possible to estimate which kind of stress are required to be decreased and which stress-coping strategies are effective to get better performance in the play and to elevate the quality of the professional tennis players' life based in the results of this study.