Natalia B. Stambulova & Tatiana V. Ryba
The Big Idea
When Pete Sampras retired from tennis in 2002 he said this: “It’s not easy to retire at 31. In one respect I was glad I was done. But after a few years of having fun, I got a little restless. When you’re 33, 34 and you don’t have a focus, you can get kind of lost. As a man, you feel a little bit unfulfilled.”
Sport careers, transitions, and assistance programs have become an active research area in the field of sports psychology in the 21st Century. Part of the reason, of course, is because most sporting careers are short—at least when compared to other creative performance categories like music, theatre, film, or the arts. Pete Sampras’ retirement is just one example of a life experience replicated thousands and thousands of times, generation after generation all over the world.
This research paper is basically a literature review, but one with a message to those who focus on career research and assistance.
Takeaways
- Adopt a holistic perspective: Basically using what is called an ecological approach where the whole career, the whole person, and a whole environment are embraced.
- Contextual and cultural grounding: Becoming inclusive and culturally relevant in adopting understandable research questions, definitions, and theories, strategies, and interpretations.
- Idiosyncratic approach: Move to more individually tailored approaches over blanketed services.
- Transnational frameworks: Adding sensitivities for the lived experiences of athletes who by nature are regularly crossing international boundaries inevitably affecting their identities, values, and beliefs.
- Multicultural and transnational consulting: Professional practices and CAPs must include networks, international cooperation, communication, services, integration, and collaboration.
- Participatory action research: Adopt a research-intervention-research cycle. This means find the right question, devise an intervention, and then assess the effectiveness of the intervention.
The Research
One advantage of reading through the actual full text of this literature review paper is that it is a relatively quick way to catch up on the current status of research on athletes’ career development and assistance. Given that the authors are reviewing reviews, not much published research on this important topic is missed. Of particular interest is the 2013 publication of the International Society of Sport Psychology: Athlete’s Careers across Cultures (ACAC). This publication covers career research and career assistance in 19 countries. Since for the first time national language literature is cited (as opposed to English language only in preceding reviews), there is the natural invitation to study careers and assistance by way of culture-based methodologies.
The newer emphasis on cultural diversity opens up the conversations about athlete career research and assistance to be more faithful to the word “international” in the ISSP reviews. Over the years this topic had been reduced to mostly elite athlete lives, post-retirement—represented perhaps by the Pete Sampras retirement. Early on the research was cross-cultural and heavily based on surveys and questionnaires to assess the similarities and differences between the retirement lives of athletes in different countries. In time, cultural psychologists influenced a turn to study the ways in which a retired athlete may or may not adjust to a specific cultural mindset. And now, according to the authors of this review paper (Stambulova and Ryba), the research field ought to be integrating its projects by way of blending theory/research, practice, and lived culture. This they call cultural praxis of athletes’ careers.
So what is “athlete career research?” Based on the titles of some of the many international papers included in the recent literature reviews, the kinds of topics studied include early professionalization in sports, athletic retirement itself, human adaptation to transitions, career transition needs, athlete life skills, trajectories and stages in career or talent development, and second careers.
And what is “career assistance?” Basically, this means the study of the kinds of assistance programs that are available to athletes in whatever country or culture. Brief examples include The First Tee (USA), Life Skills for Elite Athletes (AUS), The Canadian Sport Centre Network, Performance Lifestyle Program (UK), the various Olympic Training Centers, and other CAPs around the world (Career Assistance Programs).
The earliest approaches to this kind of research—the cross-cultural—resulted in identifying four major traditions: North American, Australian, West European, and East European. These were the categories based on the English language only research papers. But with the ACAC publication (with about 500 research references) including national languages and cultural contexts, the authors of this review paper identify three dominant and two emerging traditions. The three dominant discourses are North American, Australian, and European (the Russians are now included in the European). The emerging research activities in career research and assistance are Asian (examples being China and Japan) and South American (the example, Brazil).
Other nations not especially active in studying this research topic typically borrow the research from other counties. For example, Mexico imports research from USA and Canada and Spain. It is also the case that many of the models developed in the dominant cultures are widely shared across all dominant cultures. It is also true that there is a great deal of cross-pollination within the CAPs. Of the some 60 CAPs identified in the ACAC, for example, the Australian ACE program, which provides career and education services to support elite athletes as they move through and out of their sporting lives, has been adopted by the UK, New Zealand, and Ireland.
What lessons are learned from this extensive review of reviews? It seems that most all of the researchers rely on a narrow research method base. In other words, most of the researchers use quantitative or qualitative methods. Very few studies use longitudinal methods (studying subjects over time). Rare as well are narrative and ethnographic studies that rely on stories or descriptions. Also largely absent are intervention studies where comparisons might be set up between different treatments. They believe that most of the studies even today are not truly culture-based—meaning little effort is made to understand the cultural context of whatever career or assistance theory or practice is grounded. CAPs are typically more culturally representative, but even here the practitioners are more focused on the “what” of the program or service, not the uniqueness of a “how.” And then there are the really practical complications of financial support, promotions, accessibility, sensitivity to the cultural context, and inclusivity with regard to women, indigenous, transnational, and immigrant populations.
Finally, it is the author’s recommendation that this entire area of research and program conduct be overhauled. The authors are sensitive to the incredible and ever-increasing complexity of modern sport brought about mostly by the growing cultural diversity within international sporting cultures. They suggest that all career researchers and practitioners adopt this new approach, what they call cultural praxis of athletes’ careers (outlined in the takeaways above).
