Title

The Role Of Gender Identities And Stereotype Salience With The Academic Performance Of Male And Female College Athletes

Keywords

Academic performance; Athletics; Identity; Self-affirmation; Stereotypes

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to examine factors that moderate the experience of academic identity threat among college athletes who represent a stigmatized group on most college campuses (Yopyk & Prentice, 2005). It was hypothesized that because they are more engaged in academics, female college athletes would be especially threatened by the prospect of confirming the "dumb-jock" stereotype. As predicted, female college athletes performed more poorly when their athletic and academic identities were explicitly linked, but only on moderately difficult test items. The results also revealed that male college athletes performed significantly better (see stereotype reactance and self-affirmation) on more difficult test items when only their athletic identity was primed prior to the test. This is an important finding as there is little research on the impact of positive stereotypes on performance. The discussion focuses on the different motivational processes (i.e. self-affirmation) that impact the academic performance of male and female college athletes when aspects of their campus identity are primed within a classroom context. © 2009 Sage Publications.

Publication Date

2-2-2009

Publication Title

Journal of Sport and Social Issues

Volume

33

Issue

1

Number of Pages

78-96

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1177/0193723508328902

Socpus ID

58849156364 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/58849156364

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