Abstract
Masters sport is promoted and advertised to adults who prepare and participate in competitive events past the normative age of peak performance in their sport. Coaches working in this context rely mostly on experience and trial and error when addressing Masters athletes' psychosocial needs (Callary et al., 2018). Thus, the Adult Oriented Sport Coaching Survey (AOSCS), a 22-item, 5 factor self-assessment tool, was created for coaches' professional development (Rathwell et al., 2020). While psychometrically valid, it is important to check the credibility of the construction of the AOSCS as trustworthy in developing Masters coaches' awareness of psychosocial coaching approaches. This poster establishes the 'roots' of the AOSCS to illustrate that it is evidence-based and grounded in relevant disciplines for coaching psychosocial needs of adult learning in sport. By conducting a genealogical analysis, we linked the AOSCS to studies, conceptual frameworks, and authors that informed its creation. Starting with Rathwell and colleagues' (2020) study that outlined the design of the AOSCS, references were examined to determine how its items were created, and references from those and prior studies were examined to determine the disciplinary underpinnings of the research. This yielded 165 references, 180 authors, 10 disciplines, and 25 theories and models that play an integral role in the self-assessment tool's credibility. These findings identify important multidisciplinary roots, including education, psychology, sociology, and management that intonate the credibility of the AOSCS and orient researchers and practitioners in the usage of the tool.
