The purpose of this study was to research the psychological reactions and coping strategies of university athletes to sports injuries and to consider psychological support for sports injuries.
The subjects were 507 members of the university sports clubs. They were surveyed by an anonymous web-based questionnaire between May 2022 and April 2024. The survey items included the following: basic items such as gender and age, the name of the club, the presence or absence of previous sports injuries, psychological reactions to the injury, and responses to the psychological reactions. The psychological reactions and responses to the psychological reactions were written freely. A list of extracted words was created by extracting words contained in the sentences by means of a day mining analysis, and the frequency of occurrence of the words and the connections between the words were displayed as a co-occurrence network. KH Coder was used for the text mining analysis.
The number of valid responses was 384 (valid response rate: 75.7%). The mean age of the respondents was 18.8±1.1 years. The percentage of club activities was higher in the soccer team (21.6%), followed by the athletic team (20.3%). The sports injury status was as follows: 338 (88.7%) had a previous injury and 43 (11.3%) had no previous injury. There were 296 responses regarding psychological reactions to the injuries. The most frequently selected word was "impatient" (88 times), followed by "anxious" (84 times). The co-occurrence network for the psychological reactions showed the following connections: "impatience - practice - fear" and "environment - difference - impatience". There were 270 answers to the coping strategies. The word "consultation" was the most frequent word in the list of words extracted from these responses (113 times). The co-occurrence network of frequent words for the coping strategies showed the following connections "consultation - teacher - parent - senior" and "myself - thinking - what I can do".
The results of the text-mining analysis revealed that university athletes have psychological reactions such as "impatient" and "anxious" after sustaining a sports injury, but they cope positively by consulting with others and thinking about what they can do on their own.
Sports physiotherapists are often required to provide not only physical support, such as injury treatment, but also psychological support in the field of sports. Therefore, it is believed that more effective psychological support will be possible by considering the frequently used words in the co-occurrence network obtained from the results of this study when providing support to athletes to change the negative psychological situations they have experienced due to their injuries into positive ones.
psychological reaction
coping strategies
