Introduction and Aim
Research reveals that athletes might have short- and long-term benefits of combining sport and education, that is, pursuing a dual career (DC) pathway (Stambulova & Wylleman, 2019). To facilitate this challenging pathway, the Swedish Sports Confederation (2018) has developed the Swedish national DC guidelines for the recently established system of National Sports Universities (RIUs) and Elite-sports Friendly Universities (EVLs). The Swedish Sports Confederation invited Halmstad University DC research group to conduct an annual national survey to monitor the DC experiences of RIU/EVL student-athletes for three years (2020-2022). In this presentation we will share the findings from three years of data collection across RIUs/EVLs with an emphasis on what factors contributed to the successful DC coping of Swedish university student-athletes.
Method
Officially recognized RIU/EVL student-athletes received an invitation by e-mail to take part in the study by liaisons at each RIU/EVL. Across the years we sampled 561 participants (54% female) with a mean age of 23.82 (SD = 3.35). The participants represented all universities in the system (n = 22), 54 sport federations and studied across a variety of educations with an average study pace of 87%.
The survey was developed for this project based on the Swedish national DC guidelines, the Dual Career Survey (Stambulova et al., 2015) and relevant existing and validated instruments, all informed by national and international DC research (e.g., Brown et al., 2015; Linnér et al., 2019) and findings from two Erasmus+ sports projects: the Gold in Education and Elite Sport project (GEES; e.g., De Brandt et al., 2018) and the Ecology of Dual Career project (ECO-DC; e.g., Henriksen et al., 2020). The instrument covered (a) demographic information, (b) DC-experiences including coping with perceived challenges, the Dual Career Competency Questionnaire for Athletes (De Brandt et al., 2018), health and wellbeing (e.g., Besèr et al., 2014), DC support, and need-supportive interpersonal behaviours from key support providers through the Interpersonal Behaviours Questionnaire (Rocchi et al., 2017), and (c) overall satisfaction with RIU/EVL and DC.
Results
Using a classification and regression tree analysis (Machuca et al., 2017) we explored associations between factors related to successful DC coping. Findings of this study indicated that the key factor for coping with the DC is student-athletes’ organization and planning competence (e.g., plan in advance and use time efficiently) and that stakeholders DC support and competence-needs-supportive behaviors can compensate student-athletes’ lack of organization and planning competence. Findings also show that the combination of factors leading to least successful coping is low organization and planning competence in combination with low emotional competence (e.g., stress management).
Conclusions
Previous research has revealed a plethora of factors and competences (e.g., De Brandt et al., 2018) related to student-athletes’ DC success. This study helps support providers in suggesting what matters the most. These findings provide important implications for how DC support can be improved to facilitate sustainable DCs of athletes at RIUs/EVLs in Sweden. Among such implications is the importance of monitoring students-athletes’ ability to plan and, when necessary, provide DC support to facilitate development of such a competence.
2023.
SVEBI (Svensk Förening för Beteende- och Samhällsvetenskaplig Idrottsforskning) årskonferens, Göteborg, Sverige, 23-24 november, 2023