O processo de aculturação e a adultez emergente em atletas de futebol

• Autor(a) principal: Faggiani, Fernanda Tôrres
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da PUC_RS
• Texto Completo: http://tede2.pucrs.br/tede2/handle/tede/7701
• topic: Aculturação; Adolescência; Adultez Emergente; Futebol; Habilidades Sociais; CIENCIAS HUMANAS::PSICOLOGIA

Introduction: Soccer is a global sport and thereby the mobility of athletes to integrate new sports teams has increased significantly. From an early age, young athletes’ resident in brazilian soccer clubs from different regions of the country and abroad face the process of acculturation, i.e. the transition/insertion into a diverse culture to your depending on the career. The process by which the individual cultural passes on moving to a new place culturally different from his own, has been shown to be of great impact to grip the new reality, and it directly influences the athlete´s performance and life cycle. However, this phenomenon has been little explored and taken into account when assessing the athletes’ success and failure on the soccer context, especially in the field of Sport Psychology. Besides coming across very different cultural issues such as food, temperature and values, the athletes face intense routines of workouts interspersed with school activities, being at risk to present emotional distress by being in a new context and have little time to adapt because of high demand related to sports performance in soccer in a short period of time. Goal: To understand the process of acculturation in athletes from the soccer academy, identifying associated aspects and the transition to adulthood and emerging adulthood. Method: Survey of mixed and longitudinal design using a semi-structured interview, sociodemographic questionnaire and six instruments: Social Skills Inventory, Inventory of Dimensions of Emerging Adulthood, Scale of Future Expectations for Adolescents, Beck Anxiety Inventory, Beck Depression Scale, Stress Symptoms Inventory. Eight athletes from a soccer acadamey club in the south of Brazil participated in the qualitative research. They were residents at the Club for at least 6 months and aged between 16 and 20 years. Twenty-nine athletes participated in the quantitative stage, considering that all these 29 acculturated athletes filled all the instruments on the admission at the Club but only 21 athletes completed the two subsequent applications, three and six months after their arrival at the Club. Content analysis as well as descriptive and inferential statistical analysis checking frequencies and correlations between variables were used for the data analysis. Results: Although the results do not show significant changes in variables over the three times collected during the six months of the process of acculturation, 63% of the acculturated athletes demonstrated social skills deficits after six months of this process, being the coping factors and self-exhibition the most significant ones. The athletes presented minimal symptoms of anxiety, depression and stress in the process of acculturation. However, significant correlations were found between social skills and selfcontrol of anxiety and depression. According to content analysis (Bardin, 2011), athletes describe points as the arrival at the Club without knowing anyone, the customs of the southern region, temperature, type of training, as well as the distance from home and the family as risk factors for adaptation and that interfere in their sports performance. They also make reference to an increase in the use of new information and communication technologies (ICTS) as WhatsApp for interaction with friends and family. Regarding the acculturated athletes emerging adulthood, they seem to be experiencing this phase, mainly features like ambivalence, exploration of identity and experimenting with possibilities, as being optimistic about what the future holds. In addition, the results show that athletes have prospects that they consider important for their future, especially connected to work, the constitution of a family and their health. Both age and future prospects are the only ones that appear to be significant predictors of emerging adulthood. Discussion: The decrease of social skills and athletes’ speech strengthen studies that postulate the fact that the adaptation to a new culture can be a complex process and it can involve risk. Understanding the acculturation process and the challenges faced by athletes upon arrival at a new Club is important for prevention concerning social alienation, the deficits in social skills and sports performance failures. The forming of new links and support networks proved necessary and one of the main strategies used by athletes to face the adversity of the process of acculturation and the sport. Regarding emerging adulthood, the results seem to identify that athletes take on adult responsibilities as supporting a family, as well as freedom of choice and the possibility to experience new situations within a professional field and a romantic one. This occurs before assuming the role of adult accomplishing the dream of building his own family and obtaining professional stability, as they appear in the future prospects of these athletes. These responsibilities and future prospects seems to positively affect the mental health of athletes who do not have high levels of anxiety and depression. In addition, the future prospects were significantly influential to the emerging adulthood.