A Grounded Theory Approach to the Extension and Revision of Scanlan's Sport Commitment Model

This study used a grounded theory approach to extend and revise T.K. Scanlan's (1 993) sport commitment model. An attempt was made to extend the generalizability of the model and to address perceived conceptual limitations. It is argued that these limitations arose from casting the model entirely from a social cognitive perspective. The participant sample consisted of 25 athletes actively competing at the intercollegiate, national, international, or Olympic level. They competed in the following sports: wrestling, basketball, soccer, football, track and field, and triathlon. All participants engaged in a semi-structured interview lasting between 60 and 90 minutes. Verbatim transcripts were subjected to inductive content analysis via the constant comparative method. This generated a series of eight thematic hierarchies representing the participant sample's reported sources of sport commitment. Five of these hierarchies corresponded to the original constructs of the sport commitment model. They are Enjoyment, Involvement Alternatives, Investments, Social Constraints, and Involvement Opportunities. These hierarchies also included a number of component themes that served to explicate and differentiate these constructs. The remaining three hierarchies reflected superordinate constructs proposed for addition to the model. They are Transcendence 1 Teleology, Transformation, and Adaptive Functioning 1 Coping. These constructs had a decidedly clinical I humanistic-existential flavour, and they were the inevitable consequence of conducting hermeneutic research using a conceptual repertoire extending beyond social cognition. The end result was a richer, denser, more complex theoretical model that can now be tested using positivistic, quantitative methodologies.