Perfectionism predicts injury in junior athletes: Preliminary evidence from a prospective study

ABSTRACT

According to the stress–injury model (Williams & Andersen, 1998), personality factors predisposing athletes to elevated levels of stress may increase the risk of injury. As perfectionism has been associated with chronic stress, it may be one such personality factor. So far, however, no study has investigated the relationships between perfectionism and injury utilising a prospective design. Therefore, the present study examined perfectionistic strivings, perfectionistic concerns and injury in 80 junior athletes from team and individual sports (mean age 17.1 years; range 16–19 years) over 10 months of active training. The results of logistic regression analyses showed that perfectionism positively predicted injury, but only perfectionistic concerns emerged as a significant positive predictor. The likelihood of sustaining an injury was increased by over two times for each 1 SD increase in perfectionistic concerns. The findings suggest that perfectionistic concerns may be a possible factor predisposing athletes to an increased risk of injury.

KEYWORDS:

• Perfectionistic strivings
• perfectionistic concerns
• injury
• junior athletes
• longitudinal study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Additional analyses showed that results were the same when the number of injuries was used in the correlation and regression analyses.

² Following Cohen (1992), correlations with absolute values of .10, .30 and .50 are regarded as small, medium sized and large.