The Impacts of Burnout on Athletic Identity and Attitude towards Sport

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

 

Dear authors,

Thank you for this important study on the impact of burnout on the athletic attitude and identity in collegiate athletes. This is undoubtedly a very important topic, however, I do think your paper requires some additional attention. I have provided more detailed comments on your manuscript below, but would like to advise that you pay particular attention to my questions on the ethical set-up of the study, as I do have some serious concerns there, which I hope you will be able to answer.

 

Abstract:

You refer to the fact that the accumulation of responsibilities can lead to experiencing burnout. However, I do think it’s important to mention, even if it’s only in a few words or sentence, that it isn’t merely the amount of responsibility but also the capacity to cope with the demands that may lead to burnout. I think it is important to highlight the complexity as otherwise it might appear that burnout is “merely” the result of “too much”, when clearly there’s more to it than that.

 

Introduction.

First paragraph: Same comment as above, try and be somewhat more nuanced when discussing the causes of burnout.  

In your introduction you address different sources of burnout. In order to provide a bit more structure to your introduction, I would suggest clustering these sources according to themes, i.e. psychological and personality traits, social, external aspects such as time management etc.  

When talking about the aims of your study, you refer to the “third gap addressed in the present study”, but you haven’t talked about the fact that the other two gaps will be addressed by your study. May I advise that you differentiate some more between the gaps in research and what the study aims?

 

Method ;

Please restructure your method; at present, it is difficult to understand what you did precisely and when. As you seemed to have conducted essentially two studies, of which the first was a type of screening process for the second, I would advise making that much clearer. At present, this is quite difficult to understand, especially as some of the info outlined prior to and immediately after table 1 seems to be same, but not quite. Also, I would suggest you include subheadings, to indicate how you recruited participants, what types of questionnaires you used, data recording and analysis.

What type of statistics did you use to analyse the first part of the study, i.e. the questionnaires? What kind of qualitative framework did you use to analyse your data?

I must admit that I have some ethical concerns about your study that I hope you might be able to address:

So how did you ensure that your study complied with ethical standards? Did you gain ethical approval from an ethics board? Also, as you seem to have identified participants for the semi-structured interviews based on the questionnaires, these were clearly not anonymous. If I understand this correctly, you diagnosed athletes with burnout through the questionnaire. Did these athletes know they were suffering from burnout? Did you have a psychologist or psychiatrist with you to ensure these athletes received the necessary psychological care?

You also indicate you approached the participants through their coaches. You indicate that athletes’ participation was voluntary, but how did you make sure that the coaches didn’t pressure their athletes into participating?

Lastly, you indicate that you maintained a high level of transparency, which is great. However, how did you go about balancing transparency with protecting the sensitive nature of the data? Please explain.

 

Results:

The first paragraph of your results is actually part of your methodology. Please also explain the content of the interview script.

Your results include quite a bit of interpretation. Make sure you reserve this for the discussion, and try to remain as objective as possible throughout.

 

Discussion

Your discussion would very much benefit from the same type of structure you applied in your results. I would advise using the themes you have distilled as a framework, and explore the impact of how burnout affected the athletes’ attitudes along those thematic lines. That would require a bit of a rewrite of the discussion though.

 

Applications

You write that by understanding these aspects, significant others could help prevent or mitigate feelings of burnout. I think this is jumping to conclusions. Burnout is a serious condition that requires psychological help and the athletes you interviewed apparently were already suffering from burnout. So in that case understanding how burnout affects them, might be used to help them recover from burnout. But that is very different to preventing it. Unless of course you are trying to argue that by understanding how athletes got to the point of burnout, measures can be taken to prevent that from happening. But that is a somewhat different research question to the one you said you attempted to answer.

As to developing mental skills training programs, that is certainly valid, but again, much more related to how to prevent burnout.

 

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attached document. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Overall, it is a high quality paper, actually more or less a ready to be published. Maybe the expressions and interpratations could be improved a bit, and more explanations would be great, and the quality of the language, see bellow.

On the first page "Athletes who experience burnout display the symptoms in various ways; emotionally, psychologically, and behaviorally." could be improved to "Athletes who experience burnout diplay symptoms in different areas: emotional, psychological and behavioural. On the 10th page "totaling" into "totalling".

Author Response

Please see attached document. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

I would like to congrats the author by the article. It represents an important factor that has a big influence on the athletes's performance, such as burnout. 

So, a document is attached with some corrections. Read de review report carefully and if you have any doubt, please contact me. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see attached document. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors, 

thank you for taking the time and effort to address my comments and questions, which now makes your paper and associated arguments much clearer. 

Kind regards and congrats!