Winning in the Long Run: Towards a Psychosocial Sustainability of Adolescent Dual Careers
Table of contents
Project description
The concept of dual careers for athletes refers to the challenge of combining an athletic career with education or employment. Our four-year project focuses on talented adolescent athletes, who often prioritize their athletic career as they struggle to reconcile the training and competition demands of high achievement sport with the academic requirements in upper secondary school. Understanding the developmental path as a process of transformation through participation in cultural practices, this research will add important insights into the ways in which adolescent athletes actively construct their life trajectories in the context of youth sport culture. Our aim is to provide empirical evidence to national stakeholders for a contextually appropriate dual career strategy for young athletes in Finland.
Study protocol
Dataset
Research goals
- To broaden our understandings of the risk and resilience factors related to the construction of the dual career pathways.
- To examine the processes producing differences in adolescent integration of sporting and academic pursuits (e.g., individual characteristics, parenting styles, peer networks, psychological functioning in two high achievement environments).
- To examine the ways in which cultural narratives and discourses of gender, career and sport simultaneously enable and restrict individual development (e.g., motives for achievement, decision-making and life choices of talented adolescent athletes).
Published media
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This study is endorsed by the Finnish Olympic Committee.
