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Cross-Lagged Associations between Gratitude and Adolescent Athlete Burnout

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Abstract

The current study aims to investigate the cross-lagged relationship between gratitude and adolescent athlete burnout through the corresponsive perspective of personality. Adolescent athletes completed surveys at two time points with a three-month interval. Current study used structural equation modeling to examine hypothesis. Contrary to previous studies, the results revealed that after controlling for the gender, age, and athlete burnout at time 1, gratitude at time 1 did not predict athlete burnout at time 2. However, this study found a reverse relationship by showing athlete burnout at time 1 negatively related to gratitude at time 2. The findings indicate that athletes’ experience of burnout might decrease dispositional gratitude. The mechanisms and the implications for measuring gratitude were discussed.

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Notes

  1. The term “others’ benevolence” in this study does not mean it can only be provided by humans. McCullough et al. (2001) suggested people can experience gratitude due to nonhuman agents’ action (p. 225). Therefore, I adopt this perspective throughout the paper.

  2. The data for this study were collected in the context of a larger project. None of the analyses or findings reported in the present research has been reported in any prior work.

  3. We administered only two waves because some coaches did not want their athletes to change training schedules for the study.

  4. In the reverse model, gender significantly predicted Time 1 gratitude (β = 0.15, P < 0.05) and Time 2 sport devaluation (β = 0.10, p < 0.05). In addition, age significantly predicted Time 1 gratitude (β = −0.14, p < 0.05). Full results can be requested from the authors.

  5. Supplementary analysis was conducted to examine the construct reliability of latent variables using coefficient H (Hancock and Mueller 2001). CFA model was built with two waves of data in which corresponding measurement error across time for each item was correlated together. The results indicated the coefficient H at Time 1 was 0.56 for reduced sense of accomplishment, 0.81 for emotional/physical exhaustion, and 0.80 for sport devaluation. For Time 2, coefficient H was 0.56 for reduced sense of accomplishment, 0.86 for emotional/physical exhaustion, and 0.85 for sport devaluation. The coefficient H of reduced sense of accomplishment in the two waves failed to meet the minimum recommendation of 0.70, suggesting that the construct reliability of reduced sense of accomplishment might be inappropriate (Hancock and Mueller 2001).

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Acknowledgments

Lung Hung Chen’s research on gratitude was supported by Ministry of Education, Taiwan (2012 project of elastic salary for outstanding teacher) and National Science Council, Taiwan (100-2410-H-179 -007).

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  1. Department of Recreation and Leisure Industry Management, National Taiwan Sport University, No. 250, Wen Hua 1st Road, Kueishan, Taoyuan County, Taiwan

    Lung Hung Chen

  2. Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Yen-Ping Chang

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Chen, L.H., Chang, YP. Cross-Lagged Associations between Gratitude and Adolescent Athlete Burnout. Curr Psychol 33, 460–478 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-014-9223-8

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