An investigation of the five-factor model of personality and coping behaviour in sport

Coping strategies are important for performance in sport and individual differences may contribute to the coping strategies adopted by athletes. In this study, we explored the main and interactive effects of the big five personality dimensions on sport-related coping and compared personality profiles of discrete groups of athletes. Altogether, 253 athletes (mean age 21.1 years, s=3.7) completed the NEO-FFI (Costa & McCrae, 1992), and the Coping Function Questionnaire for Sport (Kowalski & Crocker, 2001). Results showed that extraverted athletes, who were also emotionally stable and open to new experiences (a three-way interaction effect), reported a greater use of problem-focused coping strategies. Conscientious athletes (main effect), and athletes displaying high levels of extraversion, openness, and agreeableness (a three-way interaction effect), reported a greater use of emotion-focused coping strategies, and athletes with low levels of openness, or high levels of neuroticism (main effects), reported a greater use of avoidance coping strategies. Different personality characteristics were observed between higher-level and lower-level athletes, between men and women athletes, and between individual and team sport athletes. These findings suggest that the five-factor model of personality can help distinguish various levels of athletic involvement and can help identify the coping strategies athletes are likely to adopt during participation.     

Acquiring an Attacking Forehand Drive: The Effects of Static and Dynamic Environmental Conditions

Abstract

Two groups of 10 novice subjects each were trained to perform attacking forehand drives in table tennis and land the balls as fast and as accurately as possible onto a target on the opposite side of the net under two different training conditions. Under the static training condition, the balls were to be struck from a constant position, and under the dynamic training condition, balls approached the subjects in a normal way. Both groups were tested under dynamic conditions prior to and after four days of training, during which they received 1,600 practice trials. Both groups of subjects were shown to increase the number of balls that landed on the target, and learning was also evident from an increased consistency of the direction of travel of the bat at the moment of ball/bat contact. However, no increase in consistency was found for the location of the bat at the moment of ball/bat contact and for the movement times. Thus, learning can occur in the absence of externally generated time-to-contact information, but this is not due to the establishment of a consistent movement form. Learning appears to progress from control at the moment of ball/bat contact backward, toward the moment of initiation.     

Competing by investments or efficiency? Exploring financial and sporting efficiency of club ownership structures in European football

Professional European football clubs have been hypothesized to maximize sporting or financial objectives. The authors analyze the impact of various ownership structures on the realized management efficiency in maximizing profitability and national sporting success. Therefore, they apply the time-varying stochastic frontier model by Battese & Coelli (1995) to an unbalanced panel from England and France between 2006 and 2012. French professional football is characterized by a shift towards private investors. Results show that clubs majority-owned by private investors are less efficient than other clubs in French Ligue 1. In English professional football, the majority of takeovers is pursued by foreign investors. Although previous researchers have shown that foreign investors increase financial resources and team investments, the authors demonstrate that foreign investors reduce both financial and sporting efficiency. The analysis of survival and financial team efficiencies of club ownership structures indicates that clubs tend to compete by investments rather than efficiency.     

L’éducation en prison à la périphérie de l’éducation pour tous

International Review of Education - Prison education on the margins of education for all – Prison education is an issue which would benefit from a more active role of initiative on the part...     

Book reviews

Henry Holt & Co.     

Defining functional requirements for acquisitions records: Vendor metadata

Vendor records are one of the key components underpinning the acquisitions record in the integrated library system. Acquisitions and collection development practitioners increasingly need to record, access, and manipulate acquisitions vendor metadata for purposes not foreseen by the architects of current generation ILSs. The authors posit that vendor records can serve as an appropriate metaphor for the entire acquisitions record in the development of standards. The analysis of data elements and proposed grouping into fields, records, and metarecords suggests a direction for further development and enhanced functionality. The authors call on librarians, systems vendors, and materials vendors to engage in a dialog aimed at creating an accepted standard for vendor records that will meet the needs of all parties.     

Getting looped in to the web: characterizing learning processes and educational responses

Through profiling and matching processes, technology provides individuals with information that becomes redundant to their previous beliefs, attitudes and preferences. The emergence of informational redundancies encouraged by some technologies is likely to influence the way knowledge is constructed by individuals in these settings. In this paper, we present a theoretical basis, rooted in cognitivist and socio-constructivist educational psychology, to characterize such knowledge-construction processes in informal settings. Learning processes in these environments are defined as cumulative: on the individual level, the most likely form of learning is through accretion of knowledge into previous schemata; on the social level, these environments foster learning through cumulative talk. We highlight the challenges that this might pose to education systems and suggest possible educational responses.