Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to determine if different types of sport (e.g., objectively evaluated versus subjectively evaluated) and different sport outcomes (e.g., successful versus unsuccessful, winning versus losing) result in different attributions of causality and dimensionality in gifted athletes. A total of 52 subjects from an academic centre for gifted athletes took part in this study. All individuals were 14 through 16 years of age. Both males and females were included in the study. Utilizing published literature, and paying special attention to identified problems associated with attribution research, a Performance Outcome Survey was developed to measure the causal attributions that athletes give to explain their successes and failures in competition. The responses to the open-ended instrument indicated that the subjects perceived psychological factors, physical training factors, environmental factors, and other competitors to be the main causal attributes for successes and failures. While it was hypothesized that different types of sport and different outcomes would result in different attributions, application of chi-squared analyses revealed no significant differences. When the four categories of causal attributions were collapsed and subjected to independent 2 x 2 analyses of variance, only the dimension of stability was found to be significantly different between winning and losing outcomes. Verf.-Referat