How Much of Your Identity Is 'Athlete'?
Playing sport is not the same as building your sense of self on it
Two people can train the same number of hours a week and have completely different relationships with the role of 'athlete'. For one, it is a container - a big, enjoyable part of life that sits alongside a career, a family, other interests. For the other, it is closer to the whole container: performance there stands in for self-worth everywhere, and other identities have been left underdeveloped while the sport took the space. Sport psychology treats how central and how exclusive the athlete role is as its own trait, one that predicts how well someone copes with an injury, a bad season, or eventually retiring - and it has nothing to do with talent.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer as someone who plays or trains in some sport regularly, at whatever level - this is not only for professionals.
What it measures
The first bar is overall athletic identity, in the spirit of the Athletic Identity Measurement Scale: how central being an athlete is to how you see yourself. The other two bars are not part of that published scale - they are closely related constructs from the wider athletic identity literature: exclusivity (how underdeveloped your other identities are next to it) and negative affectivity (how much a bad performance or an injury spills into your mood generally). This differs from the sports-fan test, which is about identifying with a team you support, and from the exercise-motivation test, which is about why you work out, not about how much your sense of self rides on it.
Based on: Athletic Identity Measurement Scale (Brewer, Van Raalte & Linder, 1993)
Possible results
Athletic identity
How central being an athlete is to your sense of self.
Exclusivity
How underdeveloped your other identities are next to the athlete role.
Negative affectivity
How much a bad performance or an injury spills into your mood generally.
Common questions
Is having a strong athletic identity a bad thing?
No - on its own it is linked to commitment, training consistency and performance. It becomes a risk only in combination with high exclusivity, when almost nothing else has been built alongside it, because that is what makes an injury or retirement hit like an identity crisis rather than a setback.
How is this different from just loving your sport?
Loving a sport is about the activity; identity is about what it does to your self-concept. You can love a sport intensely while keeping it clearly separate from your worth as a person - that combination, in fact, tends to hold up best over a long career.
Does this only apply to competitive athletes?
No. The scale has been used with recreational and amateur athletes as well as elite ones, since the underlying question - how much of yourself is tied up in this role - does not depend on level of play. A weekend runner can score just as high on exclusivity as a professional.
Sources
- Brewer, B. W., Van Raalte, J. L., & Linder, D. E. (1993). Athletic identity: Hercules' muscles or Achilles heel?. International Journal of Sport Psychology, 24.
- Visek, A. J., Hurst, J. R., Maxwell, J. P., & Watson, J. C. (2008). A Cross-Cultural Psychometric Evaluation of the Athletic Identity Measurement Scale. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology. doi:10.1080/10413200802415048
- Brewer, B. W., & Petitpas, A. J. (2017). Athletic identity foreclosure. Current Opinion in Psychology. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.05.004
An honest note The first bar draws on the Athletic Identity Measurement Scale, originally developed by Brewer, Van Raalte and Linder in 1993 and since catalogued and cross-culturally tested by other researchers; the second and third bars are not part of that published scale but closely related constructs discussed in the athletic identity literature - exclusivity and negative affectivity - so treat them as a useful lens, not a validated subscale. Items here are Quinthea's own wording, not the published ones, so scores are not comparable to published norms. None of this is specific to elite or professional athletes; it applies just as well to amateur and recreational sport.
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