In this presentation I am going to focus on the role of two ISSP projects in stimulating new trends in career transition research in sport psychology. The first was the ISSP Position Stand on Athletes’ Career Development and Transitions (Stambulova, Alfermann, Statler & Côté, 2009). This paper was innovative in a sense that it initiated a dialogue about various cultural discourses in career transition research all over the world. The authors emphasized that career researchers internalize their objectives from the socio-cultural contexts they belong to, and therefore, this context (usually hidden) should become visible, and moreover its constitutive role in the transition process should be revealed. The second project was the ISSP monograph “Athletes’ careers across cultures” (Stambulova & Ryba, Eds., 2013) that collected experts’ reviews of national career/transition research and career assistance programs in 19 countries across five continents. The monograph continued the dialogue about various cultural discourses in career transition research (see also Stambulova & Ryba, 2014) and introduced a new paradigm termed cultural praxis of athletes’ careers (Stambulova & Ryba, 2013; 2014). In this paradigm well established approaches in career transition research (e.g., the holistic developmental perspective; Wylleman & Lavallee, 2004) were integrated with approaches developed in cultural sport psychology (e.g., cultural positioning of research projects, attention to idiosyncratic transition pathways). This new paradigm is challenging and still not fully adopted by transition researchers but it has already stimulated an increased diversity in the transition research with several recently emerged trends. More specifically, I am going to focus on: (a) studies exploring temporal structures of normative (athletic retirement and the junior-to-senior), and non-normative (injury) transitions (Ivarsson, Stambulova, & Johnson, in press; Lundell Olsson & Pehrson, 2013; Reints, 2011), (b) contextualized research on dual career transitions (Blodgett & Schinke, 2014; Stambulova, Engström, Franck, Linnér, & Lindahl, 2014) (c) studies on quasi-normative transitions (i.e., predictable for certain categories of athletes), such as important competitions (e.g., Olympic Games as career transitions; Schinke, Stambulova, Trepanier, & Oghene, 2014), transitions to residential elite performance centers (Poczwardowski, Diehl, O’Neil, Cote, & Haberl, 2013), and cultural transitions (Agergaard & Ryba, 2014).
Rome: Pozzi , 2015. Vol. 31, no 1-2, p. 19-20
ISSP 2015, 50th Anniversary of International Society of Sport Psychology (ISSP) Meeting, Rome, Italy, 19-20 April, 2015