Identity and Athletic Retirement – A prospective study

The article is an in-depth psychological analysis of the alliance shared between athletic identities and athletic retirement, using a longitudinal prospective design. The researcher cum author, Patricia Lally a sports consultant, has been involved with sports psychology at college level for over six years. She decided to dissect the subject in order to comprehend better, the athletic identity transformation during the transition period of one’s athletic career, as well as to investigate whether the identity crisis experienced by some athletes post-retirement is evadable or not. Lally carried out in-depth interviews with the participants at three stages, one pre-retirement and two post- retirements in their athletic careers. She covers the multidimensional facets of the human identity, and how one of these represses the others, thus creating a vacuum for identity crisis, in this case for post retirement athletic individuals. Hence concluding that only the one’s who have been in a long state of preparedness, are able to cope up with the post athletic retirement blues. The author has been articulate and unpretentious about the infirmities of her work. Christina M Patterson’s article, “Career Termination” is truly divergent from this piece as this article is well covered and appropriately objective in opinion.

Physical Activity and Mental well-being typologies in corporate employees: A mixed methods approach

The article is an attempt at understanding the correlation between physical activity and mental well being in case of corporate employees with sedentary lifestyles. Authors Dr. Cecilie Thogersen-Ntoumani and Prof. Ken R. Fox belong to the field of Sport & exercise psychology. They intended to determine the possibility of being able to segregate physical activity and mental well being typologies, so that further zeroing in could be done to search for viable target groups on whom effective interventions maybe attempted. Mixed methods approach has been used for the research in order to perform an amalgamation of quantitative cluster analysis and qualitative interview content analysis. The researchers have collected the data and divided them into clusters in order to further study them through the qualitative approach. By using the mixed methods they have conclusively been able to narrowly pinpoint at groups that could be targeted in future for interventions. The article has been very descriptive yet not as structured as required for a reader. Since not much study has been carried out in this particular arena, the authors have set a stage for future prospective researches in the concerned field as well as the varied queries it opens the doors to.