Impacts of Psychosocial Factors on Sport Performance across Career Stages of Olympic Athletes in Sri Lanka

Abstract

This research study has taken a step further to study and combine both factors ‘psychosocial’ and its impacts on sport performance. The psychosocial factor is relating to the interrelation of social factors and individual thought and behavior. There has been a majority of explorations of the social dimension and psychology aspect in Sri Lanka. But limited investigation was carried on the relationship with psychosocial factors and sport performance. In the recent past, psychosocial factors were mostly used in studies in medical and health sciences. This investigation which was carried out with the Olympians is unique since they were not interacted on a similar study before. The objective of this study was to investigate psychosocial factors and their influence in successful and poor sport performance across career stages of Olympic level athletes. The theoretical framework for the research was based on the ‘developmental model on transitions faced by athletes’. The study population was selected from athletes who represented Sri Lanka during 2000 Sydney to 2016 Rio Olympic Games. Ten Summer Olympic athletes (N=10) have taken part in the study sample representing five individuals and one team sport. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect data. Thematic analysis was used to analyze data and focus on examining themes within data. The collected information was preferred into three parts and eight categories. The research has revealed that the psychosocial factors contributed to the successful sport performance and poor sport performance evenly during initiation, development, mastery phases and maintenance stages. The impact of parents, family, coach, peers, siblings and other factors were studied among career stages. The results presented that the psychosocial factors play a different role in the different career stages. For instance, supportive family and parents were the most important factors to Olympic athletes’ successful sport performance on the initiation stage and the lack of family and coach support was a more important factor to poor sport performance during the maintenance stage. The research was recommended for future research and implication.