The quadripartite approach to passion in sport: a prospective and cross-domain analysis with intercollegiate student-athletes

ABSTRACT

We tested if distinct combinations of harmonious passion and obsessive passion for sport were associated with outcomes within sport, academics, and in one’s life. We analysed data from the Student-athlete Well-being and Achievement Project (SWAP), a study in which intercollegiate student-athletes (N = 298) completed assessments of harmonious and obsessive passion at the start of a season, and assessments of performance, experiences, and satisfaction in sport, academics, and in life at the end of a season. Results showed that high harmonious passion combined with low obsessive passion (i.e., pure harmonious passion) was most often associated with the most adaptive outcomes, whereas high obsessive passion combined with low harmonious passion (i.e., pure obsessive passion) was associated with the least adaptive outcomes. These results build on previous research with recreational athletes [Schellenberg, B. J. I., Verner-Filion, J., Gaudreau, P., & Mbabaali, S. 2021. The two dimensions of passion for sport: A new look using a quadripartite approach. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 43(6), 459–476. https://doi.org/10.1123/jsep.2021-0048] by showing the benefits of pursuing competitive sport with high harmonious passion, especially pure harmonious passion.

KEYWORDS:

• Academics
• harmonious passion
• obsessive passion
• performance
• well-being

Acknowledgements

Funding for this research was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (430-2018-00275). We thank Sophia Mbabaali and Cody Rogers for their assistance with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Anonymous data and syntax files are available on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/8jt6r/.

Notes

1 Using G*Power software (Faul et al., 2009), we estimated that this sample size would be sufficient to detect small-to-medium sized effects (f² = .085) assuming at least 80% power and α = .05 in a regression model with two predictors (i.e., HP and OP). Although we also planned to test the HP × OP interaction, we focused our power analysis on detecting the main effects of HP and OP because significant HP × OP interaction effects are not often reported in the passion literature (e.g., Schellenberg et al., 2021).

2 This model had more parameters than clusters, which caused a message to be displayed in our output warning that the standard errors may not be trustworthy. This warning is displayed because the impact of having more parameters than clusters is not well known (Muthen, 2016).

3 Schellenberg et al. (2021) did find that pure OP was associated with greater performance-approach goal attainment than non-passion. However, they note that there is doubt about whether attaining performance-approach goals can be viewed as an entirely adaptive outcome.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [Grant Number 430-2018-00275].