Applied Sports Psychology

Applied Sports Psychology

Applied Sports Psychology

Introduction:

Applied social psychology mainly deals with the mental and behavioral processes of human beings, with special emphasis on the socio cultural context of the competitive sports. The feelings associated with sports, including motivation, self esteem and anxiety also play an essential part in shaping social cultural behavior and are associated with other behaviors, such as achievement and competition (Williams, 2005, Pp: 615).

In order to solve problems related to sports and to deal with social psychology, psychosocial interventions (PSI) are introduced that not only look into details of the issue but also find ways to get them solved. These psychosocial interventions mainly aim at providing assessment of the issue, followed by support, explanation and education, building concentration and finally the reinforcement of reality. Once reality has been reinforced, further follow up programs are presented to observe the results of psychosocial intervention.

The Psychosocial Intervention:

A rationale the PSI and an appropriate design:

According to the details provided by the club representative, all the members of the club are divided into groups, based on their backgrounds and affiliations. This implies that the urban girls are grouped with their likes and similarly rural girls are grouped with other country girls. This segregation prevents them from getting acquainted with one another, and they also miss the opportunity of getting access to people with different backgrounds and to develop compatibility with them.

In order to resolve the issue, a special group psychosocial intervention program has been designed to mould the behaviour of club members in a promising way and to increase the sportsmen spirit and flexibility to deal with other people (Smith and Smoll, 2002, Pp: 65). The different groups are supposed to learn the importance of coordinating and working in harmony, which is the major setback being faced at the moment.

The psychosocial intervention would start with lectures and realistic models to change group behaviour. That would be followed by a few activities and finally the results would be assessed by taking views f the participants and observing their reaction to the same situation after going through the psychosocial intervention (Dosil, 2006, Pp: 548).

Whole the club would be included in the sample, and no screening would be carried out as the psychosocial intervention is supposed to bring a complete change in attitude rather altering the behaviours of a few members. Active participation of each and every member would be encouraged, and even non-willing participants would be made to attend the sessions in order to get the message across in a coherent manner. The participants would also be encouraged to share their views, feelings and sentiments about a particular situation and also the way they react to it. The information regarding feelings and reactions of the participants is of utmost importance as it provides useful background knowledge and also assists in getting to the core of the issue (Taylor, 2000, Pp: 286). The more information would be provided, the easier it would become to solve the issue as trying would this knowledge would be more ...