Values and clean sport

ABSTRACT

The spirit of sport, which encompasses intrinsic values associated with sport participation, is core to the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) strategy for doping prevention. The contribution of these values to clean sport has yet to be established. In this study, athletes rated the importance of spirit of sport values (WADA, 2015) and sport values (Lee et al., 2000, 2008) and indicated their clean sport likelihood in a hypothetical scenario. Clean sport likelihood was positively predicted by the five spirit of sport values (ethics/fair play/honesty, respect for rules/laws, dedication/commitment, teamwork, community/solidarity), two sport value domains (morality, competence), and 11 sport values (contract maintenance, being fair, conscientiousness, sportspersonship, show skills, health/fitness, caring/compassion, team cohesion, achievement, tolerance, obedience). Clean sport likelihood was best predicted by moral values.

KEYWORDS:

• doping
• psychology
• sport

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Rokeach distinguished between two common uses of the term value. He observed that people may say that an object has a value or they may refer to personal values. Sometimes the wider literature considers the merits of sport as if it were an object. WADA appears to take that interpretation when it seeks to preserve what is intrinsically valuable about sport. In this article, we focus on personal values.

² The questionnaires are available from the corresponding author. We created portrait versions of the questionnaires and used a 6-point rating scale to match the PVQ-RR (Schwartz et al., 2012). We reworded some of the moral value items to militate against potential misunderstanding. The item “it is important to them that they do what they are told” correlated poorly (rs =.12 to.17) with the original four moral items and reduced coefficient alpha (α =.65). This item measures obedience (Lee et al., 2000, p. 318), rather than morality, and, therefore, we replaced it with a contract maintenance item from the original YSVQ namely, “it is important to them that they don’t spoil the event or competition” (Lee et al., 2000, p. 315).

³ After examining our first study purpose, the pattern of correlations suggested that there might be a moral factor in the spirit of sport values that would predict clean sport likelihood better than the composite spirit of sport construct. Accordingly, we conducted an exploratory factor analysis of the individual spirit of sport values (see Table S1, Supplementary Material). Importantly, we found that clean sport likelihood correlated somewhat better with a “moral” spirit of sport factor (r =.22) than the composite spirit of sport construct (r =.18).

⁴ The sport status values correspond conceptually to the basic self-enhancement values of Schwartz et al. (2012). These self-enhancement values have been found by Ring et al. (2020) to predict doping likelihood.

⁵ The spirit of sport construct accounted for 3% of the variance in clean sport likelihood. In terms of individual values, the ethics/fair play honesty spirit of sport value explained 8%, which is similar to the fairness sport value (8%) but less than the contract maintenance sport value (14%).