Perceived Social Support On Self-confidence Of The Collective Athletes

Psychomotor performance has been an important training and research field of collective projects in competitive sports. Sporting self-confidence is an important section of athletes' mental ability, and it's also the faith and amount of assurance to obtain success in competitive sports. Therefore, it is a key topic which has drawn much attention of trainers, athletes and sporting psychologists. On the other hand, Competitive characteristics of competitive sports make social support to be an important role in many aspects of sports activities (Richman, Hardy, Rosenfeld, & Callanan,1989). Based on these current situations, this research wants to explore the relationship and impact paths of specific sources of understanding social support and sporting self-confidence in different stress situation, with the purpose to offer mentality and theoretical basis of increasing the level of athletes'self-confidence, and help athletes have excellent competitive states.This study randomly selected 413 university athletes in Shandong Province who are majored in the collective items (such as football, basketball, volleyball, and so on). With the statistical techniques of variance analyses, multiple regression and equation of structure, Perceived Social Support Scale of Collective Items Athletes, Athletes' Stressors Questionnaire and Athletes Psychological Factors questionnaire were used to explore how different sources of perceived social support,(team-mates and coaches),impact athletes' self-confidence in common training and regulation games, under different stressors. The purpose was to offer theoretical basis for athletes to improve their self-confidence level and competitive readiness. After deep analysis and discussion, the results can be showed as follows:1) The level of collective items athletes' perceived social support is above the average. Perceived social support from coaches was higher than team-mates', and there was significant difference between the both.2) The significant difference of demographic variables, such as sex, whether the only child or not, and sport items, was not found in the level of collective items athletes' perceived social support. However, sports fixed number of year influenced athletes' social support, the more, the better.3) Stressors and perceived social support had prominent negative correlation. Stressors of lost of competition and life dilemma had most important influence to athletes' perceived social support. Other factors were internal and external pressure, sports injury, environmental factors and interpersonal relationship.4) There was no significant sexual difference in collective items athletes' stressors, but male athletes' stress level was a little higher than females'. About the specific dimensions, male athletes' sports injury was higher than females'.5) Perceived support from team-mates, stressors and athletes' self-confidence had significant correlation, but when stressors were controlled, the correlation between perceived support from team-mates and self-confidence wasn't significant; whether controlling stressors or not, there was not significant correlation between perceived support from coaches and self-confidence.6) Perceived social support from team-mates and coaches, and stressors can forecast athletes' self-confidence; Stressors played total intermediary roles between perceived social support and self-confidence, and "lost the competition", "life dilemma" and "environmental factors" had the maximum negative influence on self-confidence. The results of this research implied that perceived social support impacted self-confidence indirectly through the fully mediated effect of stressors. This conclusion supported the stress-buffering model.