Many studies have been done to establish the link between psychological variables and risk of injury. These studies have supported the ideas from William and Anderson’s (1998) model of stress of and injury. For example, Johnson and Ivarsson (2011) found that injured athletes had a significantly higher life event stress, somatic trait anxiety, mistrust, and ineffective coping. While this is only a cross-sectional study, looking for an association between variables, and it was not as sentficaly strong as other study designs, the study was still method strong. They had a large sample size of 177 and a clear definition of injury, they prospectively measured injuries after the physiological …show more content…
There have been two studies looking at stress, perceptual narrowing, and injury (Rogers, Alderman, & Landers, 2003; William & Anderson, 1999). Rogers et al., (2003) found athletes with high stress had increase perceptual narrowing, before a real life stressful situation (a completive game) compared with athletes with low levels of stress who had less perceptual narrowing before a game, these results were statically significant. Roger et al., (2003) study design had a high level of external validity by examining the athletes in a real-world application (Hutchison, 2017e). Roger et al., (2003) did not measure if injuries were sustained, but nevertheless their results illustrate good evidence for mechanism of a sport injury resulting from increase life stress casing increased perceptual narrowing. The second study by William and Anderson (1999) found a significant correlation between negative life stress and sport injuries (r = 0.43), and additionally found a significant correlation between perceptual narrowing and sport injuries (r =0.28). This study was strong methodically in design with a large sample size of 196 athletes, prospectively collecting injury data and clear difetion of injury (William & Anderson, 1999; Hutchison, 2017a; Hutchison, 2017b). Both studies give strong evidence of the biological plausibility that increased life stress causes perceptual narrowing which leads to increased …show more content…
al. 2017); A study with a much larger sample size found no difference and had a narrow confidence interval for example, for male study participants, the treatment group incidence rate was mean 2.9 95% CI (1.9-3.6) and the control group incidence rate was mean 2.8 95% CI (2.1-3.7) (Tranaeus et al., 2014) The four remaining studies also had small sample sizes and did not find a statistically significant reduction in injuries and did not provide CI or incidence rates. It may be concluded therefore psychological interventions do not reduce the number of injuries when given to the general athlete population (not screening for individual with psychological risk factors). This argument is further backed up by the poor randomized control designs, with inconsistent data collection and definitions of injury and type of intervention (Hutchison, 2017c). Therefore, until more methodically rigorous studies are conducted, I would not recommend giving a psychological intervention to general athlete populations to reduce