Coach and Athlete Burnout - West Virginia University

classified as being high or low in terms of their autocratic and democratic decision-
making behaviors.
Preliminary Analyses for Collegiate Swimmers
Burnout 25
To assess the reliability of the Athlete Burnout Questionnaire and Leadership
Scale for Sports: Athlete Perception subscales, internal consistencies were calculated
using Cronbach’s alpha coefficients (See Table 1). All alpha coefficients were above .70.
Notable is that the reliability for the autocratic subscale of the LSS was also adequate
with an alpha coefficient of .80. This is encouraging considering literature has previously
noted the potential problems associated with the internal consistency of this subscale
(Dwyer & Fischer, 1988).
Descriptive data (e.g. means and standard deviations) for swimmers’ perceptions
of coaches’ decision-making style for those subscales of the LSS in addition to their
reported levels of burnout of each subscale of the ABQ can also be found in Table 1. The
means for athletes’ perception of their coach’s decision-making style are comparable to
those reported by Chelladurai (personal communication, March 1, 2004). An analysis of
those studies using the athlete perception version of the Leadership Scale for Sports
yielded an average democratic score of 3.05 (SD= .71) and an average mean for the
autocratic scores of 2.64 (SD=.72). Because the Athlete Burnout Questionnaire was
published recently (2001), norms were not yet available for comparison with the present
study’s results.
To examine any potential differences in the data obtained from those “elite”
collegiate swimmers competing in the World Swimming Championships and those
swimmers who did not compete in the event, independent sample t-tests were utilized.