Study of the effect of psychological coping skills on the stress and sport injury relationship

Sport injury is doubtlessly one of the major events in the athletes’ life, which has different unwilling outcomes for athlete and society. Athletes are dealing with acute and chronic stressors in all their sport life span. The study of the relationship between stress and sport injury and its various aspects seems to be of interest in many studies. Also, among many extrinsic and intrinsic factors, the effect of intrinsic psychological factors on incidence of sport injury has been discussed in some studies. It has been said that some psychological factors show their direct or undirect effect on sport injury vulnerability via stress response in athletes. One of the important psychological elements of stress- sport injury model of Andersen & Williams (1988) is coping resources. It is assumed that coping has an effective role on stress/ injury bond in athletes. Two primary coping styles are approach coping and avoidance coping. Also, four styles of coping are identified that frequently appear in athletes responding to stress. These coping styles are described as problem-focused coping (problem-oriented strategies directed to the environment and self), emotion-focused coping (managing emotional responses to stress and changing the meaning of situations), appraisal-focused coping (appraising or reappraising stressful situations using reframing of situations or logical analysis), and avoidance-focused coping (behavioral and psychological efforts to disengage from the demanding situation).The value of studying an athlete’s coping style improves the ability to predict an athlete’s use of coping strategies in response to stressful events, and to predict coping strategies in response to events of similar stressors in the future. According to documents, this study was done to investigate the effect of psychological coping skills such as “Coping with adversity”, “Coachability”, “peaking under pressure”, “Goal setting/Mental preparation”, “Concentration”, “Freedom from worry”, and “Confidence and achievement motivation” on the relationship between stress and sport injury.

Based on a convenience sampling, a total of 341 male and female injured athletes of varied sport majors and with a mean age of 26.35 participated in this descriptive correlational study. All the sample members had no sport activity for at least one day because of sport injury. The research design was retrospective, so to do this, the “Life Events Survey for Collegiate Athletes” was used to assess stress level, and the “Athletic Coping Skills Inventory-28” was used to evaluate coping strategies. Sport injury is defined as any type of injury or physical condition that results from sport participation, which requires medical attention, and prevents participation in sport activities for a period of time. To assess the sport injury characteristics in participants a designed questionnaire was used. The effect of coping skills on life stress/ sport injury relationship was investigated using logistic regression modeling.

Total Coping skill and its two subscales of “Coping with adversity” and “Coachability” did not show any significant effect on stress and injury relationship, but five subscales of “peaking under pressure”, “Goal setting/Mental preparation”, “Concentration”, “Freedom from worry”, and “Confidence and achievement motivation” had a significant moderating effect on this relationship.

It seems that teaching and using appropriate coping methods to promote stress confrontation strategies can lead to better stress management and reduction of sports injuries in athletes. Being able to actively and effectively cope, helps athletes to react to stressors in different conditions. Coaches also need to be aware of useful effects of different state and trait psychological variables to educate athletes, resulting in better performance and decreasing sport injury vulnerability. Since each stressor is proven to be independent of each other, some stressors appear to be more predictive of coping style than others. Being able to give athletes a tool kit of useful coping styles like ability to lessen the worry, to concentrate, to have confidence, being motivated, to perform under pressure, and goal setting can help the athletes to put them into practice immediately and respond to specific stressful situation, and return to optimum performance. In total, applied results of psychological surveys will effectively reduce the individual and social side effects of sport injury.