Achievement goal theory and disordered eating: Relationships of disordered eating with goal orientations and motivational climate in female gymnasts and dancers

Abstract

Objectives To examine the relationships between disordered eating in female gymnasts and dancers and their perspective towards achievement in sport and dance, respectively. With an emphasis on outperforming others (ego involvement), more disordered eating was expected than when personal progress (task involvement) was emphasized. Methods Ninety-four aesthetic performers from gymnastics ( n = 59) and dance ( n = 35) completed questionnaires measuring ego and task involvement (individual orientation and motivational climate), dieting, self-esteem, perfectionism and weight-related peer and coach pressure. Results Partial correlations indicated that a stronger ego orientation was related to more dieting, greater perfectionism, more weight-related peer pressure, and lower self-esteem. Similar relationships were found for performance climate. Mastery climate on the other hand was negatively related to dieting, and coach and peer pressure, suggesting that when performers perceived the motivational climate as mastery, less frequent dieting was reported and less weight-related coach and peer pressure was perceived. No relationships were found between task orientation and disordered eating. Most importantly, regression analysis showed that after controlling for BMI, both ego orientation and mastery climate made a unique significant contribution to explaining dieting variance. Conclusions Goal achievement theory is an important framework for explaining disordered eating in female aesthetic performers. Both ego orientation and mastery climate play a role in dieting of gymnasts and dancers. Aesthetic performers who are strongly ego-oriented tend to display more disordered eating correlates. Furthermore, it seems that to protect against disordered eating, coaches and teachers should create a mastery climate and target self-improvement and self-referenced comparisons over interpersonal competitiveness.