A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW OF STUDIES OF ATHLETES’ PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS

Abstract

A systematic review is one of the methods that facilitates researchers to reach and obtain evidence for identifying current information. It also simplifies research design selection and studied factors to answer research questions for future studies. The purpose of this study was to present a  systematic review result of research methodologies adopted in regard to studies of athletes’ psychological characteristics. The search term “athletes” or “sports” was used in combination with “psychological characteristics,” “mental characteristics,” “psychological attribute,” “mental attribute,” “psychological aspects,” “mental aspects,” “psychological profile,” or “mental profile.” The following electronics databases were searched: Google
Scholar, Scopus, Web of Knowledge, PubMed, Sport Discuss, and Descorberta. The acquired articles were evaluated and analyzed against the inclusion criteria, and then the data were presented.

This study found that the first athletes’ psychological characteristics article was published in 1977,and the number of publications has continually increased since then (1997-2014: 37 articles published in 28 academic journals). Particularly, during 2010–2014, the number of published studies clearly increased [16 out of 37 articles (43.24%) from 15 journals]. Moreover, the majority of the studies were causal-comparative studies [23 out of 37 articles (62.16%) from 21 journals], cross-sectional studies [35 out of 37 articles (94.59%) from 28 journals], and quantitative studies [29 out of 37 articles (78.37%) from 25 journals]. The most widely used instruments for collecting data were questionnaires [33 out of 37 articles (89.18%) from 27 journals]. The majority of applied samples were athletes [33 out of 37 articles (89.18%) from 26 journals]. This systematic review has evinced that the most applied methodologies were quantitative studies (29 articles) and the least were longitudinal studies (2 articles).

(Journal of Sports Science and Technology 2016; 16(2) : 99-113)

KEY WORDS: Psychological characteristics, Athletes, Research design, Data collection