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- Ryba, Tatiana, et al.
(author)
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Cultural transitions and adaptation in a transnational athletic career
- 2015
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- With the rising globalization of the sports economy, athletic careers have become increasingly transnational. In comparison with an international career, a transnational athletic career is more open-ended regarding the countries of one’s origin, settlement, and retirement. The production of mobility and adaptation to a cultural transition are critical phases for initiating and maintaining the transnational career. In this paper, we conceptualize cultural transition as a quasi-normative career transition, typically coinciding with other within-career transitions and career termination. In other words, cultural transitions are normative or predictable in the course of transnational athletic careers. The paper is based on data gathered for the research of transnational athletes’ career development and transitions in Nordic countries—that is, participants had at least one migration to or from Finland, Sweden, Norway, or Denmark during the duration of their career. The participants were both male and female, either professional or amateur in various sports, and their ages varied from 18 to 37. Narrative inquiry from the life story perspective (Atkinson, 1998) was used to elicit and analyze 15 athletes’ narrations of the ways in which their careers were negotiated in a complex sociocultural space spanning physical and discursive borders (i.e., geographic, linguistic and socio-political). Through narrative analysis, we discerned several interconnected storylines related to elite sporting (sub)cultures, gender and ethnicity discourses embedded in a particular sociocultural context, and transformative life transitions in and through which personal meanings were reconstructed. We suggest that (1) meaning reconstruction and (2) repositioning in social networks constitute the key psychological processes associated with the cultural transition. The results moreover empirically substantiated the concepts of cultural transition and adaptation, which are the focus of this presentation. The present research also contributes to clarifying the emerging concepts and establishing a common language in career transitions literature.
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| 2. |
- Ryba, Tatiana, et al.
(author)
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”Sport has always been first for me” but “all my free time is spent doing homework” : Dual career styles in late adolescence
- 2017
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In: Psychology of Sport And Exercise. - Amsterdam : Elsevier. - 1469-0292 .- 1878-5476. ; 33, s. 131-140
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- ObjectivesIn adolescence, personally meaningful autobiographical memories begin to integrate into cultural narrative structures to form a life story. We examined how and to what extent adolescent Finnish athletes narrate and integrate significant life events in sport and education into their identities and future narratives in order to delineate the different styles of athletes’ career construction.DesignLongitudinal qualitative study.MethodTen female and eight male, elite junior athletes, aged 15–16 at baseline, participated in individual conversational interviews. The resulting interview data were analyzed using narrative analysis.ResultsThirteen of 18 adolescent athletes drew primarily on the performance narrative plot to construct their life story and five of 18 athletes could not project into the future beyond their athletic selves. We identified three styles of athletes’ career construction. Employing musical terminology as a metaphor, the contrapuntal style entwines sport and education as harmonically related life-themes; monophonic style draws on a prominent athletic life-theme; and dissonant style is underpinned by discord of sport and education. We did not detect direct associations between narrative types (performance, discovery and relational) and career construction styles. We show the dominant style development within an exemplary story.ConclusionExploration of the future and possible selves are critical for developing meaningful (dis)continuity of a dual career pathway from adolescence to adulthood. We conclude that dual career discourse is gaining traction in directing young athletes’ future thinking; however, a broader repertoire of exemplary success stories which allow athletes to imagine achieving excellence in diverse ways would enable them to channel action. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd
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| 3. |
- Stambulova, Natalia, 1952-, et al.
(author)
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Dual Career in Sport and Education : Context-Driven Research in North America and Europe
- 2016
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In: Association for Applied Sport Psychology - 2016 Conference Program & Proceedings. - Indianapolis : Association for Applied Sport Psychology. - 9780985531058 ; , s. 148-148
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Within the North American intercollegiate (school-based) sport context, the career development of student-athletes is an established research area focused on athletes’ transition to the university and their athletic, professional, and personal development, including preparation for the university graduation and termination in sports. In contrast, athletes’ simultaneous pursuits in sport and studies, termed a “dual career” (DC) (European Union Guidelines on Athletes’ DCs, 2012), is a relatively new research trend within Europe, where sport is mainly club-based. Therefore, special arrangements between sporting and educational institutions are needed to facilitate athletes’ DCs. European researchers adopt a holistic lifespan perspective (Wylleman, Reints, & De Knop, 2013) to consider student-athletes’ athletic and academic pursuits as intertwined with their psychological, psychosocial, and financial developments. It is also emphasized that athletes (although supported) are expected to take responsibility and develop competences to successfully initiate, maintain, and terminate their DCs. This symposium brings together North American and European researchers to discuss overlapping and specific features of DC research and applications in situ. The first presenter will briefly overview the US context of intercollegiate sports, introduce athletic identity foreclosure as a problematic issue and share a new sport-specific instrument to measure identity foreclosure. The second presenter will introduce a Canadian DC context and summarize four projects on how specific populations within it, that are immigrant and Aboriginal student-athletes, cope with DC challenges in conjunction with their acculturation processes. The third presenter will “transport” the audience to Finland and share a mixed-method project on achievement motivation of Finnish adolescent athletes, emphasizing a cultural construction of motivation. The fourth presenter will outline researc h findings on DC competences of Swedish adolescent athletes as a part of the European project titled “Gold and Education and Elite Sport”. The discussion will then be concentrated on DC intervention strategies, situated within national cultural contexts.
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