| dc.description.abstract | Sport is the most prevalent out-of-school time activity for adolescents (Sabo & Veliz, 2008) and is often touted as a context to promote positive youth development. However, the evidence for whether sport promotes character is mixed. Theory suggests that character development occurs through exchanges between individuals and contexts and, more specifically, through individual’s exchanges with other individuals (Lerner & Callina, 2014). Moreover, development can only be understood through the specificity principle (Bornstein, 2017), which asks: which contexts, promote which outcomes, for which individuals, at which points in time? This thesis examined associations between individual attributes (e.g., contest orientation) and contextual features (e.g., peer motivational climate) that are important factors for determining whether sport promotes adolescents’ character. That is, the primary goal was to examine the main effects of athletes’ contest orientation and their perceptions of the peer motivational climate of their sport team on the athletes’ moral disengagement in sport. The secondary goal was to examine the interaction effect between the individual factors and the contextual factors. The tertiary goal was to examine if the relation between the individual factors, the contextual factors, and the individual by contextual factors and moral disengagement further vary by sport classification, namely sport level (i.e., varsity versus junior varsity), athletes’ gender, and sport type (i.e., football versus soccer).
This thesis used secondary data derived from an evaluation study of Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA), which yielded a sample that included 239 athletes (23.8% female; 33.9% white; mean age = 16.5) participating in sports who completed self-report surveys comprised of several quantitative measures of character. Hypotheses were tested through the use of hierarchical linear regressions. Moderators were tested through interaction terms and interpreted using simple slopes. Overall findings showed that, in contrast with theoretical foundations, interactions between the context and the individual may not matter as much for youth character development as previously thought, but instead the context, in this case peer motivational climate, may be the most important factor in youth character development. | en |
