Sport commitment among children and adolescent through the lens of theory of organismic integration: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Introduction Most of the athletes who participate in the Olympic Games are between 20 and 30 years old. Popular sport therefore has a reserve of Olympic talent for the 2032-2044 cycles. The involvement of children and adolescents in sport contributes to their socialization, academic success and emotional stability, as well as to sustainable development goals in general. The purpose of this study is to identify potential areas for enhancing sport motivation in children and adolescents and to formulate the concept of sport identity based on organismic integration theory.

Methods The scope of the systematic literature review included bibliographic sources for the period from 2014 to the present, devoted to various aspects of the motivational component of sports activities in children and adolescents. The initial data collection was conducted in the academic databases Scopus and Web of Science using formal searches. Since the documents were selected from two scientific databases, duplicate publications were excluded from the output (Pavlova, 2024). The next step of the literature review was the analysis of the formed pool of studies using the Bibliometrix library in the R-Studio environment (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017), which allowed to identify the main headnotes related to the research topic and to characterize the temporal dynamics in the development of the research topic. For a more detailed study, 22 publications were selected, which allowed us to validate the theoretical framework of this paper.

Results The bibliographic analysis identified two polar clusters: «external motivation» (related to the concepts of "game", "gamification") and «internal motivation» (related to the concepts of "coach", "media", "social networks"). The conclusion was that internal motivation is formed indirectly through multiple repetitions of external influences. This phenomenon is explained by the theory of organismic integration (OIT) and grows into the concept of III: Influence, Internalization, Identity. Thus, the emotional experience becomes part of the personality through internalization, which leads to the formation of a sport identity.

Discussion/Conclusion The mechanism of internalization of external motivational influences and the factors affecting this process are still understudied. From the practical perspective, the possibilities of emotional reinforcement of motivation for sports activities at each lesson or training session (e.g., progress charts, electronic apps for individual tracking of sport success, instant feedback, gamification of the training process) can be considered promising.

References

Pavlova, A. (2024). Motivation for sport among children and adolescents [Data set]. Kaggle. https://doi.org/10.34740/KAGGLE/DS/6194684

Aria, M., & Cuccurullo, C. (2017). bibliometrix: An R-tool for comprehensive science mapping analysis. Journal of Informetrics, 11(4), 959–975. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2017.08.007

Pelletier, L. G., & Rocchi, M. (2023). Organismic integration theory: A theory of regulatory styles, internalization, integration, and human functioning in society. In The Oxford Handbook of Self-Determination Theory (pp. 53–83). https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197600047.001.0001