A Meta-analysis Of Athletes’ Sport-specific Stress And Burnout

PURPOSE: This meta-analysis quantified the relationship between athletes’ sport-specific stress and burnout. METHODS: This systematic review and meta-analysis were conducted following the PRISMA statement. A comprehensive search strategy was carefully designed to select eligible studies of athlete life stress and burnout. EBSCO, ProQuest, PubMed, OVID, and WOS databases were searched. All searches were limited to results from January 2001 to September 2021. Three keywords were used to identify relevant articles: (1) burnout, (2) stress, and (3) athlete* OR sport* OR player*. Only peer-reviewed publications available in English were included. Further, the criteria below were used to examine each article to determine its exclusion: (1) the study was not related to sport-specific stress and burnout; (2) the study was literature or review; (3)the samples investigated were not athletes; (4) the study was not a quantitative analysis. RESULTS: A total of 20 quantitative empirical articles were included; most of these studies used the Athletes Burnout Questionnaire with a three-dimensional model (Raedeke & Smith, 2001) to measure athlete burnout. The athlete’s sport-specific stress measurements included the College Student-Athletes’ Life Stress Scale (CSALSS; Lu et al., 2012) and the Recovery-Stress Questionnaire (RESTQ; Kellmann & Kallus, 2001). The meta-analysis results showed a significantly high correlation between athletes’ sport-specific stress and burnout, yielding an overall effect size with an r-value of 0.471. The relationship between athlete sport-specific stress and the three dimensions of burnout (physical/emotional exhaustion, devaluation of sports participation, reduced sense of accomplishment) were a significant moderate to high correlation with the r-value of 0.464, 0.352, and 0.508, respectively. CONCLUSION: Athletes’ sport-specific stress was highly related to athletes’ burnout, as the coping strategies for sport-specific stress were important to athletes. However, most studies used student-athletes as the research samples; the academic requirements might also be a large stress and is worth exploring in the future.