The purpose of this study was to investigate athletes’ building process of resilience by overcoming adversity. An open-ended questionnaire was developed to explore college athletes’ experiences of resilience based on the review on resilience liter...
The purpose of this study was to investigate athletes’ building process of resilience by overcoming adversity. An open-ended questionnaire was developed to explore college athletes’ experiences of resilience based on the review on resilience literature. The final version of open-ended questionnaire was made after examining the content validity of the questions through 3 pilot studies and expert meeting.
140 athletes in K-university answered for the open-ended questionnaire asking experiences of resilience. 98 answered questionnaires were excluded since the responses seemed to be unfaithful, were unrelated to the questions, or didn’t reflect the main problem of this study. After all, inductive analysis was conducted for the answers in 42 questionnaires.
According to the findings, building process of resilience consists of 5 domains, which are adversity experience, appraisal of adversity, coping process for problem solving, protective factor, and development through overcoming adversity. To be specific, first, college athletes experience various kinds of adversity, such as injury, slump, performance depression, harassment by peers, conflict with coaches, change of sporting event, change of weight, or worries for academic career etc. Second, college athletes had various negative emotions through the appraisal of adversities. Third, athletes utilized various problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping strategies in order to solve the confronted problems or alleviate the negative emotions generated by the problems. Fourth, during the process of overcoming problem situations, athletes could have chances to convert their insights (i.e. understanding their coaches, recognizing the importance of other people around them, having interests in other people, or loving their lives) to earn internal resources (i.e. tolerance to adversity, positivity, confidence, driving force for growth, perseverance, mental toughness, focus edge, or hope). Additionally, it was found that internal and external protective factor had impacts on the process of overcoming adversities; continuous efforts or motivation are the examples of internal protective factors; supports or helps from people around and circumstances are the examples of external protective factors.
Causal networks were developed by deductive inference for the athletes’ responses based on the 5 domains of resilience formation process. 8 causal networks were developed according to the experiences of adversity and 1 causal network was made according to the experiences by the intervention of coaches.
These findings show the evidence for the resilience building process of athletes. Therefore, it is expected that this evidence provides specific information on the actual experiences of athletes, and especially this information could be usefully utilized as fundamental resources when it comes to explaining resilience focusing on its process.