The meaning of sport and performance among amateur and professional athletes

This paper investigates the meaning of sport and performance for amateur and professional athletes through the social representations theory. From this perspective, this study focuses on the content associated with sport and performance through word association tasks conducted with 421 amateur athletes and 64 professional athletes. Prototypical and similarity analyses showed that concerning amateur athletes, hedonism and health constitute important components of these representations. Concerning professional athletes, while sport is mainly structured around hedonism and togetherness, performance appears to be articulated around an effort/reward dichotomy. Moreover, professional athletes’ social representations of sport and performance only encompass a marginal reference to health. These results help to identify the motivations which may underpin the practice of sport among amateur and professional athletes.

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