The Relationship between Sport Self-Efficacy and Competitive Anxiety in Athletic Students: The Mediating Role of Coping Strategies

The purpose of this study was to explain the structural relationships between sport self-efficacy and competitive anxiety of athletes regarding the mediating role of task-oriented and emotion-oriented coping strategies. Questionnaires of sport self-efficacy, coping strategies, and competitive anxiety were distributed among 200 volunteer athletes from different individual and team sports. In order to determine the relationships between variables, structural equation modeling and path analysis with PLS2 software were used. The findings showed that in addition to the significant relationship between self-efficacy and competitive anxiety in direct path, self-efficacy, indirectly and due to affecting on chosen coping strategies by athlete, causes moderating competitive anxiety. More accurate examination of the model suggests that the indirect pathway of sport self-efficacy to task-oriented strategies and to competitive anxiety with higher path coefficients and greater T- value is the stronger pathway to explain the mediating role of coping strategies in relation between sport self-efficacy and competitive anxiety.