Department of Psychological Science
University of Mary Washington
Mercer Hall
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Fredericksburg, Virginia 22401
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This is such a great research question! What do you make of the fact that athletic and social identity were unrelated to mental well-being? Do you think it’s the case that these identity variables generally don’t impact mental health, or is it possible that students feel less connected to their athletic and social identities during the pandemic, which has required them to connect more strongly to other sources of identity to support their mental well-being? In other words, do you think you might get different results if you conducted this study outside of a pandemic?
Thank you for your comment Dr. Palmwood! We did expect to see a relationship between athletic and social identity and mental well-being. We hypothesis that the identities did not impact mental well-being because of the current state of the pandemic. Since the beginning of the pandemic and even in the fall time, athletes have gotten into the swing of things- scheduled practices and competitions have been occurring since February. It is possible that students found another source of outside of athletics to cope with the loss of identity. The only coping mechanism that was measured was social media, but we see that the participants felt neutral towards their use of social media. If the survey was conducted outside of the pandemic, I believe the results would differ- athletic and social identity would not impact the mental well-being but we would see higher rates of athletic and social identity.
What a relevant research questions to examine right now! I know that I’ve heard from a number of students how challenging the past year has been without their typical team interactions.
None of your predictors were correlated with well-being. Why do you think that is? Did you have a lot of variability in scale scores on your predictors, or were most participants responding in similar ways?
Also, all of your participants were currently on a team, but were they all sports that were currently practicing? Do you think the extent to which they were actively engaged with their sport/team at the time of participating in your study may have made a difference?
I will comment on the last part of your thoughts. That is such a good point made about whether or not the participants were actively engaged in their sport. When we collected our data, all the athletes were actively participating in their sport. This was definitely a limitation within our study because those participants’ athletic identity and social identity were most likely getting back to how they were before the pandemic due to how long they had been dealing with the pandemic. Also, like you stated the participants being able to engage in their team and sport helped with those identities as well. I think it is safe to say that most of the participants have gotten used to the new “normal” by now.
Do you think your predictor variables would be significant if there was a bigger sample? Do athletes feel more or less connected with their athletic identity during the pandemic? I feel like most athletes would lean on their sport to help them cope with the pandemic but some athletes might shut down and move away from their sport. Most of the teams listed are in season in the spring, do you think there is a difference if the team was in season or out of season?
HI Rachel,
I do think that the predictor variable could be significant or at least different if there was a bigger sample size. Maybe this can be done by going to another school to draw from a larger sample of varsity athletes.I feel that during the pandemic athletes where less connected with their athletic identity as here at UMW where our sample was taken varsity athletes had restrictions on their ability to meet for practice and other COVID-19 restrictions. I do think that there would be a difference if the team was in or out of season, as that would impact their ability to meet as frequently and impact their own perspectives of doing work in the off season.
Hi all! This is such an interesting research question. I think that one of the groups of students that got hit the hardest with COVID restrictions are athletes, most have little to no athletic seasons since March 2020. Were your participants only UMW students or were they recruited from other universities as well? It would be interesting to see if there is a difference between athletes from different universities since there is likely some variability with restrictions. Thank you for sharing, very interesting research!!
Hi Mariana! We wanted to get student athletes from other universities as well but we believe that most of our participants were from UMW. You pose an interesting follow-up question for future research though and I would be interested to see the results.
Great topic! Student-athletes have endured a lot of stress and change in the past year. I’m wondering if the university at which the athlete participates in a sport could have an effect on their well-being. Different schools around the country have different restrictions and requirements for their student-athletes. Does this affect their well-being? Also, do you guys think that pandemic fatigue, a lift in restrictions, and the vaccine could have affected the results?
Hi Abigail! I agree that the university that the student athlete is at could affect mental well-being and think that that would be an excellent follow-up question for us to explore.
We definitely believe that the changing of times throughout the pandemic has impacted our results. If we could have done this towards the beginning/middle of the pandemic instead of the middle/end I think we would have gotten more significant results with everything being shut down instead of having things opening up.