Student-athletes’ need for competence, effort, and attributions of success and failure: Differences between sport and school

Abstract

Our purpose was to show that highly skilled student-athletes (n = 146, 41.1% female, mean age 14.1 years) differ across domains with regard to their need for competence, effort, and attributions. As hypothesized, the results show that relative to the school domain, in the sport domain, student-athletes had a stronger need for competence, a higher willingness to exert effort, and a stronger tendency to ascribe positive outcomes to personal effort, regardless of sex and sport. For professional practice, our findings imply that effective psychological interventions such as attributional retraining should vary across domains, particularly in case of explaining positive outcomes. Lay Summary: In a unique sample of highly skilled student-athletes, we found that relative to the school domain, in the sports domain, student-athletes had a stronger need for competence, a higher willingness to exert effort, and a stronger tendency to ascribe positive outcomes to personal effort.