Anxiety in athletes: Gender and type of sport differences

Abstract

The study of anxiety, specifically its relations with sociodemographic variables, has been fruitfull in sport psychology research. This study aimed to investigate athletes’ sport anxiety regarding differences in gender and sport played. An application of structural equation modeling was made, with 601 Portuguese athletes. From them 172 (28.6%) were female and 429 (71.4%) were male. They competed in a variety of individual (e.g., athletics, climbing, orienteering, surfing, swimming, tennis; 42.6%) and team sports (e.g., basketball, handball, rugby, soccer, volleyball; 57.4%). Participants’ age ranged from 12 to 47 years (M = 17.44 years; SD = 4.99). After testing the measurement invariance of the first and second-order models, across gender and type of sport (individual vs. team), latent mean comparisons were investigated and Cohen’s d (1988) statistic was computed to obtain the corresponding effect sizes (Kline, 2016). Significant differences were detected between male and female athletes and between individual and team sports. Female and individual sports athletes presented higher levels of general sports anxiety.The results of this research provided evidence that anxiety is appraised differently by athletes based on their gender and type of sport.