The Role of Simultaneous Pursuing of Academic and Athletic Activities over Youth in Personality Development

In search of approaches to defining the psychological life history of an individual the contemporary per-sonality psychologists address the individual differences in behavior reflecting the interplay of the spe-cific real life situations and the new dynamic contextualized trait constructs which can cast light on the within-person causal dynamics. The participants of the research—thirty University-level student-athletes and 109 secondary college-level students, simultaneously pursuing the academic and athletic activities, were shown to display different levels of personality self-evolution under this specific situation depending on the sporting achievements attained. Clustering the samples (K-means algorithm) into the two groups each, which significantly differed on the personality variables, indicative of the self-evolution dynamics, showed that the higher was the level of sporting achievements the more significantly the participants ap-peared to differ on the patterns of coping strategies preferred, the emotional intelligence abilities, hardi-ness and dispositional resources of self-evolution acquired. Equally high levels of internal locus of control and the mental health continuum measures in both clusters of the university-level student-athletes can also be regarded as favorable outcomes of combining two significant life activities for stimulating the person-ality development