Shaping Identities: Exploring the relationships between academic and athletic identities and well-being among French student-athletes
Façonner les identités : Explorer les relations entre les identités académiques et sportives et le bien-être chez les étudiant·es-athlètes français
Résumé
Introduction:
Student-athletes (SA) face competing demands related to their athletic and academic commitments that can affect their well-being. To better support them in their stressful dual careers, it is important to identify the determinants of their well-being. The salience of the two identities they develop in the two primary social roles they play (i.e., student, athlete) could predict their well-being (e.g., Ballesteros et al., 2022). However, research examining the associations between multidimensional identities and SA well-being is limited and little is known about the interactive effects of academic and athletic identities. The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to examine the factorial validity, reliability, invariance, and concurrent validity of the French version (AAIS-FR) of the Academic and Athletic Identity Scale (Yukhymenko-Lescroart, 2014) and (2) to examine the relationships between academic and athletic identity salience on SA’ sport well-being.
Method:
A total of 363 French university SA (50.41% female; 81.54% aged 18-21) completed an online survey in October 2020, measuring demographic and contextual variables (e.g., gender, time spent in each role, achievement satisfaction), Athletic and Academic Identities (AAIS-FR), Athlete Burnout (ABO-S, Isoard-Gautheur et al., 2018) and Engagement (AEQ, Lonsdale et al., 2007).
Results:
After deleting one item, confirmatory factor analysis confirmed a 2-factor structure consisting of athletic and academic identities (χ² (33, N = 363) = 137.452, CFI = .956, SRMR = .039) and revealed a significant positive correlation between the two identities (r = .29). Moreover, the study demonstrated configural, metric, and scalar invariance across gender and sport participation level, as well as expected patterns of correlations between athletic and academic identity on the one hand, and gender, time spent in each role, and achievement satisfaction on the other. Finally, multiple regression analyses revealed a positive association between athletic identity and engagement (ranging from .19 to .38), as well as a negative one with burnout (ranging from -.25 to -.13), and no significant relationship between academic identity or interaction term (academic athletic) and burnout or engagement.
Discussion:
The AAIS is a relatively new measure that could become a gold standard for future dual career research. For this reason, Steele et al. (2020) encouraged the examination of its cross-cultural psychometric validity. In our study, the AAIS-FR demonstrated validity through four sources of evidence: factorial validity, reliability, invariance, and concurrent validity. We also found evidence of positive relationships between athletic identity and SA well-being. Similar to Ballesteros et al. (2022), our results did not show a moderating effect of academic identity, suggesting that the relationship between athletic identity and SA well-being did not change with different levels of academic identity. However, the percentage of variance explained was relatively low (R² adjusted from .031 to .170). Other variables, such as conflict or enrichment between the two roles (Postema et al., 2022; Rusbasan et al., 2021), may mediate the relationship between SA identity and well-being. Further research is required to explore this possibility.
Domaines
PsychologieOrigine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
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Licence |