Study On Role Transition In The Career Of Chinese Athletes

In China, there are a large number of professional athletes retiring every year. The issue of their re-employment has been widespread concerned in the community. During the process of athletes’re-employment, there are many tough challenges in education, socialization and adoption of a new social role. Whether professional athletes can adapt to their new roles successfully after retirement is an important thing, it is not only related to their lifelong development, bbut also related to the sustainable development of competitive sports in China.On the methodology level, this paper combined the normative research and the empirical research, integrated theoretical research with countermeasure research, also made extensive use of qualitative research. On the level of specific research methods, this paper used Literature, questionnaires, interviews, observation and statistical analysis method. On basis of questionnaire data collected from127retired professional athletes as well as in-depth interviews result conducted with22of them, this paper appealed to socialization theory and role theory as to discuss the role changing problems for Chinese retired athletes. This paper has draw some conclusions as follows:1.This paper analyzed five dimensions of the role switching of retired athletes. There are52%retired athletes’role function in the shape of intermediate level, and the whole level lies in medium. The continued professional socialization of social character, continued moral socialization of social character and continued relational socialization of social character respective reached59.8%、71.6%、65.4%、66.1%. The whole level is higher than the average level.2. By inducing and combing the interviews results, the retired athlete’ professional socializing process can be divided into three phases:(1) anticipated socialization of professional social role,(2) fixation socialization of professional role and (3) adaptation and development to professional role. 3. Through relevant devising assumptions, selecting and testing variables, this research discovered thyt there are seven factors exerted remarkable influence on a retired athlete’s role switching, they are education background, professional records as athletes, professional network, social relationships and family support. Among these factors, professional network and social relationship weighs the most. Furthermore, this study finded out a negative correlation between the role switching of a retired athlete and his former professional record and achievement. Those who relied on the assigned work from a certain organization accomplished their switching process much more successfully than those who did on their own.4. This paper argues that the process of a retired athlete’career switching is driving by both internal force and external force. The internal force denotes personal need which contains physical needs and development needs, while the external force refers to organizational pressure which contains the pressure from organizational system and interpersonal communication. There are three channels can help the retired athletes to accomplish the role switching, this paper suggested that training is the basic approach, communication between different social roles is an important way, then practicing is a fundamental one.5.This paper puts forward that social countermeasures and individual countermeasures are the two most important solutions to the problem of retired athletes’ role switching. The former includes：perfecting the supervision mechanism of athletes’ academic education and perfecting their vocational training system. Inproving the employment supporting mechanism of retired athelets and perfecting their employment service system. The later includes:psychological adjustment and functional learning of social roles.