Sport Identity Salience, Commitment, and the Involvement of Self in Role: Measurement Issues

The social psychological concept of identity has been recognized as an important approach to the study of role-related behavior, including sports behavior. Identity has been linked theoretically to the self-concept via the notion of a salience hierarchy, and the salience of an identity in turn has been shown to be associated with time spent in role and other measures of role performance. In this article we present some measurement procedures for the study of the sport identity, and we demonstrate the utility of these procedures by testing hypotheses derived from Stryker and Serpe’s (1982) research on religious role behavior. The sample used to test these hypotheses is a purposive sample of 220 male college students and athletes.