Rebekah Palmer

Abstract:

The importance or interpersonal and emotional support and how it affects athletic success in sport and injury rehabilitation is demonstrated by encouragement and understanding from oneself and other individuals. The issue of support and how it affects athletic success is important because there are many physical and psychological factors that support impacts, thus affecting an athlete's success in sport and injury rehabilitation. The purpose of this thesis is to conduct an extensive literature review exploring the importance of support for athletic success in sport and injury rehabilitation. Research has suggested that: Support moderates or 'buffers' the impact of stress, influences commitment, relieves anxiety, and allows the individual to become more focused and experience the "flow" state more often. Support also indirectly affects emotional well­-being. Athletes who have interpersonal and emotional support are suggested to be mentally and physically stronger, suffer fewer negative health consequences, and have increased motivation to succeed. Questionnaires, structured and semi structured interviews, field correlational studies, and various scales have been used to measure support for success i n sport. It has been found that the main areas of support provided by family, coaches, teammates, physical education teachers, peers, and sport psychologists are emotional support, information support, instrumental support and increasing self­-confidence. The results of the review indicate that there are various ways in which support and support providers arc important i n impacting an athlete's success.… (altro)