5 The sport psychologist’s viewpoint
A sport psychologist and two academics from the OU’s Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies were asked for their interpretation of the ideas you have learned about in this session:
- Barker’s case
- the four main burnout perspectives
- measuring burnout, and
- categorising burnout factors.
Listen to what they had to say in Activity 5.
Activity 5 Academics in conversation
Timing: Allow about 10 minutes
Listen to the audio below featuring Professor of Sport Psychology Iain Greenlees and the OU’s Candice Lingam-Willgoss and Ben Oakley.
The purpose of this audio is to hear from experienced practitioners about burnout. This is an important summary of your learning to date. Whilst listening identify any new points that help enhance your learning from this session.
The participants also touch on other topics that you will go on to explore in later sessions.
Download this audio clip.Audio player: Audio 2
Transcript: Audio 2
BEN OAKLEY:
Hello. I'm Ben, and I'll be kicking off this conversation about the session. If I can turn to you first, Iain.
IAIN GREENLEES:
Hi, Ben. I'll start by raising two points. First is the idea that there are four different perspectives on burnout-- a perceived stress perspective, one that focuses on over-training, one that looks at motivation, and a social perspective. This is because researchers have different ways of looking at the same issue, and have slightly different perspectives on the main origins of burnout. This can appear confusing at first, but it really helps us to look at one problem from a number of different angles.
The second point is about measuring burnout, and because I'm a sport psychologist, I'll focus on the Athlete Burnout Questionnaire. The strength of questionnaires is that they allow us to compare individuals or groups with one another, and provide some standardisation of what burnout is, whilst the weakness is it's not clear what threshold numbers mean and when someone is burnt out or not. Its main use is really as a research and a comparison tool amongst the groups of athletes.
BEN OAKLEY:
OK, thanks. Candice, if I can bring you in now, would you like to add anything further to that?
CANDICE LINGAM-WILLGOSS:
Well, in my experience of teaching this topic, one of the most useful ideas is the stress perspective, since it's fairly easy to understand and we all tend to have had experiences of stress. I think the Elinor Barker case is a useful one, because you could hear how she was trying to balance a range of challenging sporting and life events at once. And this is a really good illustration of prolonged stress.
BEN OAKLEY
OK, thanks, Candice. Now it's, perhaps, my turn to contribute. I'd like to explain a bit more about assembling 15 burnout factors into one figure. As I read into the topic more and more, I could see a whole range of possible things that contributed to burnout, and they all mounted up into a very long list. And I was trying to make sense of it, so I started thinking about what categories could we fit these into? And the three-way split we came up with was prolonged overload, individual characteristics, and situational characteristics. In fact, I remember speaking to you, Iain, to check that I was on the right lines, really.
IAIN GREENLEES:
Yes, I remember that. There are many ways that you could have divided all these influencing factors, but for teaching purposes, we went for a simple, easy-to-understand approach. I liked the way we ended up with individual personality-related ideas being distinct from those situational ideas connected to a person's environment. It works as a teaching device, but how did you end up with 15 factors?
BEN OAKLEY:
Well, it started out as 22 factors, but there was too much going on, and there's lots of overlap between some of the items. So I took care over the wording and tried to avoid duplication, and that's how I pared it down to 15-- which, those are the ones that are often mentioned in the research.
CANDICE LINGAM-WILLGOSS:
There's a balance, isn't there, though between being absolutely scientifically correct with a long list and lots of definitions of terms, and a shorter, more concise list-- which is what we've got. Which works well for teaching purposes.
BEN OAKLEY:
Good. I'm glad we agree on that. We'd be in trouble if we didn't. Would anyone like to add anything else?
IAIN GREENLEES:
Yeah, I will. I think these factors are really useful in helping us to understand burnout, but they'd also be really useful in helping us when we look at how we can prevent and manage burnout.
BEN OAKLEY:
Great, thank you.
Audio 2
Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).
Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).
Discussion
When this audio has been listened to by people studying burnout they all noticed different things to take away from it. Three of the more common items that they described as enhancing learning were:
- Greenlees provides a useful summary of the advantages and disadvantages of questionnaires that attempt to measure burnout. One strength he mentions is that they allow some standardisation of what burnout is, but a weakness is that it's not clear what questionnaire score can be classified as describing someone as burnt out. He terms this as the lack of threshold numbers.
- Lingam-Willgoss reflects on her experience of teaching the topic, stating how people often relate well to the stress perspective of burnout since everyone has experienced a range of stressors and therefore find it relatively easy to understand what prolonged overload might lead to.
- A third point is one that Greenlees makes about the list of 15 burnout factors. He suggests that this list is particularly useful when you think about preventing and managing burnout (covered in Sessions 7 and 8).