A narrative portrait of sport motivation

Abstract

This qualitative study explores the subject of sport motivation in relation to the long-term and effortful participation in competitive running of six people. The research participants are aged between twenty and forty-eight years and have been involved in their respective sports from between eight to thirty-six years. All of them hold national titles or records in major races. The methodological technique employed in this study was face-to-face semi-structured interviews, which were conducted in July and August 2000. Interview questions were based on concepts contained in existing psychological theories of human motivation, which provided a deductive framework for the analysis of the interview data. This study indicated that the need to achieve was the primary factor in the motivation of the research participants. Support was found for the concepts of task and ego-involved goal perspectives to achievement motivation (Nicholls, 1984a), but these perspectives did not result in significant differences in motivated behaviour. It was suggested that sport motivation could best be understood as the search for meaning (Frankl, 1970) or self-expression through achievement. Support was found also for task and ego-involvement significantly affecting the quality of the motivated experience of the runners. Ego-involvement appeared induced in competition when the self-determination of participants was undermined by their own or others' expectations. However, using Ryan and Deci's (2000) Self-Determination Continuum of Motivation, most of the athletes exhibited behaviour consistent with a self-determining type of extrinsic motivation. Although support for the optimal experiential state of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) was found, research participants described it variously and experienced it infrequently.