A Research On The Relationships Among Athletes’ Gratitude、 Perceived Social Support And Subjective Well-being

In 2012, the American economist, R. Easterlin, led a research team published a paper China’s Life Satisfaction:1990-2010, in which the author pointed out that in the past 20 years, there was a sharp decline in terms of Chinese ordinary people’s life satisfaction, and for professional athletes in China, as a special group, their perception of happiness was close to zero. All of these findings did not match our country’s current social, political, and economical high-speed development. In order to get both nurturance of athletes’sound qualities and high-speed development of the society into an interactive virtuous cycle, it’s our goal to rapidly promote athletes’subjective well-being. An effective way to improve the sense of well-being, gratitude can ameliorate individual mental health, strengthen the ability to perceive and accept social support, and eventually help athletes to have better experience subjective well-being. This study, from a positive psychological perspective, examines the sense of gratitude and related topics among current athletes and it’s our sincere hope that it can provide direction for solidifying athletes’ gratitude and offer theoretical guidance for improving their subjective well-being。This research has used a sample of 483 Chinese elite athletes recruited in the study to complete athlete gratitude questionnaire, sports subjective well-being questionnaire, and perceived available support in sport questionnaire in order for us to understand characteristics such as gratitude level, gender, age, and length of sport career among these athletes and explore deeply the relationships between gratitude, perceived social support, and subjective well-being. We also introduce the concept of perceived social support to explore the specific mechanism with which gratitude affects subjective well-being and the intermediary role played by perceived social support. Based on processed data and analysis, the results indicated that:(1) The athletes generally have high level of gratitude; Athlete gratitude levels show significant differences in age, sports life, but not in gender.(2) Athlete subjective well-being was significantly positive correlated to gratitude and perceived social support;(3) Gratitude and perceived social support significantly positively predicted athlete engagement, altogether explaining its 44% variance.(4) To some degree, perceived social support played an intermediary role between athletes’ gratitude and subjective well-being. The mediation effect accounted for 49% of the total effect, which suggests that perceived social support is a key internal factor for gratitude to affect’ subjective well-being and it acts as a bridge between them. Strengthening athletes’ ability to perceive social support and intensifying gratitude related education will be beneficial to boost athletes’ subjective well-being.