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A qualitative synthesis of research into social motivational influences across the athletic career span

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posted on 2015-03-16, 14:40 authored by Richard J. Keegan, Christopher SprayChristopher Spray, Chris Harwood, David E. Lavallee
This study represents a qualitative synthesis of research examining the socio-environmental influences of coaches, parents and peers on athlete motivation, across the athletic career-span. Using a critical-realist perspective, meta-interpretation methodology was deployed to search and analyse the literature. On-going, iterative analysis generated new areas of enquiry and new search terms, until the emerging analysis reached the points of saturation. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were developed during this process to produce a clear statement of applicability for the study. In the final analysis, a developmental structure was specified to describe the athletic career trajectory, together with a horizontal structure capturing seven domains of the motivational atmosphere surrounding athletes (competition, training, evaluation, emotion, authority, social-support, and relatedness), and a vertical structure varying in terms of level-of-abstraction: The global/broad 'motivational atmosphere' containing contextual 'climates', built from immediate/situational 'motivational conditions'. A model of the overall 'motivational atmosphere' in sport, based on a meteorological analogy, is offered with a view to stimulating critical debate and new research directions that reflect the complexity of interpersonal motivation in sport.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

Qualitiative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health

Volume

6

Issue

4

Pages

537 - 567

Citation

KEEGAN, R.J. ... et al, 2014. A qualitative synthesis of research into social motivational influences across the athletic career span. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 6 (4), pp.537-567.

Publisher

Routledge (© the authors)

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 International (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0/

Publication date

2014

Notes

This is an open-access article distributed by Routledge under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/3.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The moral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted.

ISSN

2159-676X

eISSN

1939-845X

Language

  • en