One of the important issues in sport psychology that have come to light in Japan is resilience. Resilience refers to “the process of, capacity for, or outcome of successful adaptation despite challenging or threatening circumstances” (Masten et al., 1990). The purpose of this study was to develop Psychological Resilience Scale for University Athletes (PRSUA) and to examine the relationship between subscales of PRSUA, socio-demographic variables and stress response variables.
The subjects of 377 university athletes (male=188, female=189; mean age=19.70, SD=1.20) were asked to answer a questionnaire that was composed of socio-demographic questions, 56 PRSUA question items that were acquired from our preliminary survey in June, 2010, and 32 question items of Stress Response Scale for High School Athletes (SRSHSA) developed by Shibukura et al. (1999). Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis and reliability analysis were conducted to develop the PRSUA. In order to examine the socio-demographic differences, t-test and one-way ANOVA were conducted. Stepwise multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine the correlation between PRSUA and SRSHSA.
The results of exploratory factor analysis identified a six-factor model with 24 items on PRSUA:“Social Support from Teammates (SST),” “Social Support from Friends (SSF),” “Athletic Physical Toughness (APT),” “Athletic Self-understanding (ASU),” “Athletic Motivation and Challenge (AMC)” and “Athletic Mental Toughness (AMT).” Confirmatory factor analysis and reliability analysis confirmed that PRSUA had satisfactory fit indices of structural validities and Cronbach’s alpha coefficient reliabilities. The results of t-test showed that the mean scores of “SST,” “SSF,” “APT,” “AMC,” “PRSUA,” were significantly different between male and female, and the mean scores of “SST,” “SSF,” “APT,” “ASU,” “AMC,” “AMT,” “PRSUA,” were significantly different between higher-performance-level athletes who had experiences of participating in national athletic competitions and lower-performance-level athletes who did not. The results of one-way ANOVA showed that the mean scores of “SST,” “SSF,” “APT,” “ASU,” “AMC,” “AMT,” “PRSUA,” were significantly different among regular athletes, semi-regular athletes and non-regular athletes. The results of stepwise multiple regression analyses that were set PRSUA subscales as independent variables and SRSHSA subscales as dependent variables showed that the sub-scales of PRSUA were significantly associated with the sub-scales of SRSHSA.
The results above indicates that higher-performance-level athletes are likely to have higher psychological resilience and that PRSUA can be a valuable tool in multidimensional evaluation of university athletes’ psychological resilience as well as correlate with SRSHSA. In future research, structural equation models for the effect of resilience on stress responses and burnout will need to be explored as another tool of psychological measurement such as Burnout Scale and Dropout Scale.
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