Discovering Resilience in Sport: What We Know and Where We Need to Go

Stephen P. Gonzalez, PhD, CC-AASP, The College at Brockport, State University of New York

Psychological resilience, or the ability to experience and overcome stress or adversity, is an area of research in sport psychology that has grown quite substantially in the last decade. The need to understand how participants in sport overcome unavoidable stressors and difficult situations is of great utility for practitioners and researchers alike. While the word resilience appears in sport psychology research prior to the last decade, it is only recently that researchers focused on understanding the construct behind the term, starting with grounded theory research with athletes (Fletcher & Sarkar, 2012; Galli & Vealey, 2008).

What Do We Know About Resilience in Sport?

After the initial grounded theory studies of resilience in sport, my interest in resilience as both a researcher and a practitioner grew. However, despite new research, there were several early papers (Martin-Krumm et al., 2003; Mummery et al., 2006; Seligman et al., 1991) discussing resilience based on constructs related to resilience that could be confusing to beginning researchers. For example, participants in studies demonstrated resilience through an optimistic explanatory style (Martin-Krumm et al., 2003; Seligman et al., 1990) and greater perceptions of physical ability (Mummery et al., 2006). With many factors appearing to contribute to resilience and with qualitative investigations starting to shed light on resilience as a unique construct, there was a need to review resilience research in sport. One of the first papers on resilience in sport that I co-authored (see Galli & Gonzalez, 2015) focused on providing a comprehensive review of the resilience literature so that researchers could better operationalize and understand the construct and practitioners could see factors related to developing resilience.

Upon performing this literature review, my next focus was to better understand how to assess resilience. One of the main limitations to growing resilience research in sport was the lack of scales or measurements available. The Connor Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC; Connor & Davidson, 2003) is a measure that has received some attention in sport. The CD-RISC was originally developed with clinical psychology patients and healthy adults, but the applicability of this measure in sports was unknown. Gucciardi et al. (2011) examined the factor structure, reliability, and validity of the CD-RISC in sport settings and found strong psychometric support for a 10-item version of this scale. After examining their work, my colleagues and I replicated Gucciardi et al.’s study and extended it by examining gender invariance and using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to examine consequences of resilience (Gonzalez et al., 2016). The results of this replication study provide data to further support the use of the 10-item CD-RISC to assess individual characteristics of resilience. While the CD-RISC is not perfect (see Sarkar & Fletcher, 2013), it does provide data points to explore individual characteristics that should enable individuals to display resilience following stressors or adversity.

With a general idea of what constructs help develop and enable resilient behavior, and how resilience can be assessed, I was interested in how practitioners can use the growing literature base on resilience in sport to better train and work with athletes and coaches to develop resilience. In the most recent special issue of the Journal of Sport Psychology in Action on resilience, my colleagues and I published a framework for practitioners to use and consider when examining resilience in clients (Gonzalez, Detling, & Galli, 2017). We also provided real case-studies with step by step analyses of how we would approach cultivating resilience in the various athletes in each study. It is our hope that this work will spawn greater research-practitioner approaches to resilience development.

Where Does Resilience Research Need to Go?

While researchers have made great strides in using various qualitative and quantitative methods to examine resilience in sport, much of the emphasis is on individual factors that lead to resilience and the population generally used are collegiate and student-athletes. However, resilience is not simply about an individual navigating his or her environment alone; it is impacted by a combination of social and environmental resources interacting with personal factors. Also, with 70% of children in the United States quitting sport at the age of 13, there is value in examining resilience in youth sport in addition to competitive sport.

From a social resource standpoint, researchers are beginning to examine team resilience (Morgan, Fletcher, & Sarkar, 2015) and some scholars have developed a measure of team resilience (Decroos et al., 2017). These recent projects will help researchers and practitioners comprehensively examine the social influences of teammates on collective and individual resilience. The development of a comprehensive resilience scale encompassing individual, social and environmental characteristics and resources will also help researchers better assess ideal indicators of resilience to help empower athletes to better navigate the stressors of sport participation. The future is exciting for this area of sport psychology and I personally cannot wait to see what professionals come up with next.

References

Decroos, S., Lines, R. L. J., Morgan, P. B. C., Fletcher, D., Sarkar, M., Fransen, K., Boen, F., & Vande Broek, G. (in press). Development and validation of the charactersitics of resilience in sports teams inventory. Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology. doi:10.1037/spy0000089.

Fletcher, D., & Sarkar, M. (2012). A grounded theory of psychological resilience in Olympic champions. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 13, 669-678. doi: 10.1016/j.psychsport.2012.04.007

Galli, N., & Gonzalez, S. P. (2015). Psychological resilience in sport: A review of the literature and implications for research and practice. International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology. doi:10.1080/1612197X.2014.946947

Galli, N., & Vealey, R. S. (2008). "Bouncing back" from adversity: Athletes' experiences of resilience. Sport Psychologist, 22, 316-335. http://journals.humankinetics.com/tsp

Gonzalez, S. P., Detling, N., & Galli, N. (2016). Case studies of developing resilience in elite sport: Applying theory to guide interventions. Journal of Sport Psychology in Action, 7, 158-169. doi:10.1080/21520704.2016.1236050

Gonzalez, S. P., Moore, E. W., Newton, M., & Galli, N. (2016). Validity and reliability of the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) in competitive sport. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 23, 31-39. doi:10.1016/j.psychsport.2015.10.005

Gucciardi, D. F., Jackson, B., Coulter, T. J., & Mallett, C. J. (2011). The Connor-Davidson resilience scale (cd-risc): Dimensionality and age-related measurement invariance with Australian cricketers. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 12, 423-433. doi: 10.1016/j.psychsport.2011.02.005

Martin-Krumm, C. P., Sarrazin, P. G., Peterson, C., & Famose, J. (2003). Explanatory style and resilience after sports failure. Personality and Individual Differences, 35, 1685–1695. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2004.09.023

Morgan, P. B. C., Fletcher, D., & Sarkar, M. (2015). Understanding team resilience in the world's best athletes: A case study of a rugby union World Cup winning team. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 16, 91-100. doi:doi:10.1016/j.psychsport.2014.08.007

Mummery, W. K., Schofield, G., & Perry, C. (2004). Bouncing back: The role of coping style, social support and self-concept in resilience of sport performance. Athletic Insight: The Online Journal of Sport Psychology, 6. http://www.athleticinsight.com/

Sarkar, M., & Fletcher, D. (2013). How should we measure psychological resilience in sport performers? Measurement in Physical Education and Exercise Science, 17, 264-280. doi: 10.1080/1091367X.2013.805141

Seligman, M. E., Nolen-Hoeksema, S., Thornton, N., & Thornton, K. M. (1990). Explanatory style as a mechanism of disappointing athletic performance. Psychological Science, 1, 143-146. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.1990.tb00084.x