Causal attributions for athletic and academic performance among Finnish high school student-athletes

The current study investigated 16-year-old student-athletes in Finnish sports high schools pursuing an athletic career alongside their academic career. The study is part of an ongoing longitudinal project entitled ”Winning in the long run: Towards a psychological sustainability of dual careers”, and aims to understand the processes that underlie individual differences in adjusting to dual careers. One problem is that adolescents – at least a great part of them – are more committed to their athletic careers than to their academic pursuits. This may be reflected in attributions they make for success and failure in the athletic compared to the academic domain. Assessing these differences is important, as attributions have been demonstrated to influence expectancy of future success, motivation and engagement. The current study investigated the causal attributions high school student-athletes make for academic/athletic performance by an extensive questionnaire to which a total of 391 first-year student-athletes responded in autumn 2015. The causal ascriptions that were considered were ability and effort, that is, how much the student-athletes ascribe their academic/ athletic success and failure to their own (lack of) ability and used effort. The first goal was to assess whether attributions were different across outcome and gender. Second, cluster analysis was performed to identify different profiles in attribution patterns and third, it was analysed to what extent gender, self-concept of academic/athletic ability as well as academic/athletic identity predict attribution style. The results indicate that student-athletes to a great extent ascribe success to their own ability and used effort, whereas failure is less strongly ascribed to lack of ability and effort. Moreover, boys made stronger attributions to ability for success than girls, whereas girls attributed especially their academic success more to effort. Student-athletes were also clustered on the basis of their attributional style. Four clusters emerged and were coined self-praising (n= 94), self-blaming (n= 97), sports-oriented (n= 66) and high personal responsibility (n= 100) on the basis of the adaptiveness of attributions. Interestingly, although the students were quite alike in terms of objective measures of ability, their perceptions of their academic and athletic skills clearly differed, with some students being more pessimistic than others. Moreover, the low ability scores that the self-blaming students gave themselves for athletic and academic skills point to the students’ lack of self-confidence across domains and also indicate that they are at risk for motivational problems in the future. The finding that the sports-oriented students awarded themselves with similarly low ability scores in the academic domain indicates that they might have problems with academic motivation and managing their dual careers. Intervention programmes that aim to replace these maladaptive attribution patterns with more adaptive ones are called for.siirretty Doriast