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Gratitude and Adolescent Athletes’ Well-Being: The Multiple Mediating Roles of Perceived Social Support from Coaches and Teammates

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Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

Cicero

Abstract

Since the positive psychology was emerged from 2000s, these positive constructs contribute to athlete’s well-being received much attention in sport. However, gratitude is a topic rarely discussed in the sport psychology. Thus, the current study aims at investigated the relationship between gratitude and athlete well-being. Furthermore, the mechanisms underlie the relationship was also explored. We proposed that the perceived social support from coach and teammate would be mediators. Participants were 291 adolescent athletes. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the hypothesis. Results indicated that gratitude is a positive related to athlete’s well-being. Besides, multiple-mediators analysis indicated that both perceived coach and teammate social support partially mediated the relationship between gratitude and athlete’s well-being. This study contributes to the gratitude and well-being literature by unpacking the essential psychological process behind the relationship. Implication and application were discussed in term of gratitude theory and social support.

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Notes

  1. In addition to the approach treating coach support and teammate support as second-order factors, we also conducted a model with ten support variables without second-order factors to gauge which specific support variables have stronger mediation effect. To acknowledge the relationship among support variables under coach support and teammate support respectively, variables under coach support were set to be related and variables under teammate support were set to be related. In this model, gratitude predicts all ten support variables, and all ten support variables predict team satisfaction, which predicts life satisfaction. Although this model fit well (SB-χ 2 = 1242.27, df = 818; CFI = 0.95; TLI = 0.95; RMSEA = 0.042; SRMR = 0.089), among the ten social support variables, only tangible support from coaches positively and significantly predicted team satisfaction. This finding may reflect a problem resulting from collinearality (i.e., related relationships among social support variables). Thus, we based our discussion mainly on the approach treating coach support and teammate support as second-order factors.

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Acknowledgments

My research on gratitude was supported by Ministry of Education (2012 project of elastic salary for outstanding teacher) and National Science Council (NSC 101-2410-H-179-003), Taiwan, R.O.C. I am grateful for Chia-Huei Wu, Yun-Ci Ye, and Yen-Ping Chang for their statistics assistant as well as insightful comments on the manuscript. Thanks also go to Kuo-Fong Pan for his permission to use the Student-Athlete Perceived Social Support Scale for this study.

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  1. Department of Recreation and Leisure Industry Management, National Taiwan Sport University, No. 250, Wen Hua 1st Road, Kueishan, Taoyuan County, Taiwan

    Lung Hung Chen

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Chen, L.H. Gratitude and Adolescent Athletes’ Well-Being: The Multiple Mediating Roles of Perceived Social Support from Coaches and Teammates. Soc Indic Res 114, 273–285 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-012-0145-2

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