"Change" Or "Acceptance"-Young Athletes Psychological Intervention Study Of Resilience Under The Guidance Of Two Different Concepts

Based on the conceptual model of sports resilience proposed by Galli and Vealey (2008), taking resilience of young athletes as research object, with62participants (12to18years old) drawn from Diving, Gymnastic and Tennis teams of Guangdong province, we compared the effectiveness of two different training methods----"change" and "acceptance"----, which rooted in the western and eastern culture, respectively, in improving the level of resilience of adolescent athletes. The purpose of this study was, on the one hand, trying to help the adolescent athletes understanding all kinds of adversities in career and improving the level of resilience through coping them correctly. On the other hand, to compare the traditional psychological skills training which come from western philosophy with using the Buddhist thought to train athletes who grown up in the background of Chinese culture, then evaluated the effectiveness of the two different interventions in improving resilience quality. The Buddhist group and the resilience group were set up, while the former group took "acceptance" concept as the guiding ideology, and the "mindfulness" method in Buddhism thought as training means. The latter one took the traditional psychological skills as training methods which based on western philosophy, mainly "change" as the core concept. The control group was set at the same time. The Resilience Scale for Chinese Adolescents (Hu, Gan,2008), the Athletes Resilience Scale and Brief Resilience Scale (Smith, Dal en, etc.,2008) were conducted as evaluation tools. The five dimensions of resilience:positive thinking, goal planning, family support, affect control, and help-seeking were adopted to assess the resilience quality. Experimental data shows that before and after the intervention, the resilience level of intervention group were significantly improved, and the improvements in Buddhist group are higher than the resilience group in most dimensions, which proves adopt "acceptance" theory to train the Chinese athlete will produce better effect. Reports from the semi-structured interviews of coaches and athletes and the estimate of the observation questionnaire from coaches also confirmed the effect of intervention.