Abstract
Athletic performance represents a foundational research topic in sport psychology, although there has been a deserved rise in examinations of other aspects of sport (e.g., mental health). Whereas performance should persist as a central construct in sport psychology, the extent to which this is true is unclear. The purpose of this study was to assess the prevalence and content of sport performance abstracts at SCAPPS.
We reviewed all abstracts presented in the sport psychology section at each SCAPPS conference from 2010 to 2023, and included those that featured a measure of sport performance. These measures were coded as direct (e.g., sport task outcome), indirect (e.g., performance level, win record), or part of a review. For each abstract, we recorded the year, authorship, institutional affiliation, study design, primary psychological topic (non-performance), sample size, gender, and sport.
Of the 1475 sport psychology abstracts, 122 (8.3%) examined sport performance directly (n = 44), indirectly (n = 65), or in a review (n = 4); a further 9 featured an unclear measure of performance. The proportion of abstracts featuring performance varied from 3.7% to 13.3% between years, within no visual longitudinal trend. Abstracts featured mostly quantitative designs (n = 98) and mixed gender samples (n = 35; 61 abstracts did not describe participant gender) across 31 different sports.
While performance is central to sport, it has been featured in relatively few sport psychology abstracts at recent SCAPPS conferences. We will discuss implications of these results for understanding applied sport psychology in Canada.
