The effects of stress factors and cognitive emotion regulation on burnout in athletes: Mixed method

Athletes face many stress situations throughout their careers. If these stress situations are not managed well, negative factors such as burnout may occur and may have effects on the careers of the athletes. Athletes use some strategies to prevent their performance from being affected in stressful situations. To provide general perspective about research' questions and problems, convergent parallel design mixed method was used in this study which evaluates qualitative and quantitative results together (Creswell & Clark, 2015). This study has two purposes: Firstly, it is aimed to understand the stress athletes experience environmentally and their coping resources. For this purpose, 6 male and 5 female athletes, who continue their active and licensed sports careers and age between 23-41 participated in the qualitative part of the study. After the consent of the athletes to participate in the research was obtained, demographic information questions and semi-structured interview questions were asked, respectively and data were analyzed with the MAXQDA22. The second purpose of this study is to examine the moderator effect of cognitive emotion regulation strategies on the relationship between sub-dimensions of perceived stress and burnout. The ages of the athletes participating in the quantitative part of the study ranged from 18 to 60 (M= 24.5, SD= 7.8). 103 athletes, who continue their sports careers actively and as licensed, participated in the study. Informed consent form, demographic information form, perceived stress, burnout, and cognitive emotion regulation strategies scale were given to the athletes participating in the study. The data were collected from the athletes online with the snowball sampling method and were analyzed using SPSS 25 and Jamovi 1.6.23 statistical programs. As a result of the moderator analyzes, it was seen that some cognitive emotion regulation strategies have a moderator effect between perceived stress and burnout. According to findings of qualitative study, it was thought that the athletes used more problem-focused strategies than emotion regulation strategies, but they thought that stress was in a bad position in their careers. Therefore, such studies should be increased in sports psychology in the future to develop and intervention programs specific to the individual differences of the athletes.