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México
Con el objetivo de conocer los factores que los niños perciben como estresantes dentro de la práctica deportiva, se llevó a cabo una investigación de corte cualitativo y de diseño fenomenológico, en la cual se realizaron cuatro grupos focales en los que participaron un total de 41 niños deportistas de entre seis y doce años pertenecientes a las disciplinas de gimnasia artística, natación clavados o fútbol. Las entrevistas permitieron identificar factores que los niños perciben como estresantes en su práctica deportiva, que según lo reportado por ellos, se dividen en dos contextos: el entrenamiento y la competencia. En el entrenamiento, los factores que más mencionaron fueron las exigencias y el favoritismo por algunos niños del grupo por parte del entrenador, así como experimentar emociones negativas, entre ellas la falta de tiempo para realizar otras actividades y el cansancio físico. En el contexto de la competencia, reportaron experimentar emociones negativas y preocupación como los factores que más les generan estrés. Los hallazgos permiten corroborar que los niños deportistas perciben distintas situaciones de estrés asociadas con la práctica de su disciplina, por lo que es importante incluir en los programas deportivos, el entrenamiento en estrategias de afrontamiento. Es probable que si los niños aprenden a afrontar el estrés de manera adecuada, no solo tendrán una mejor salud física y emocional, sino también más éxito en su disciplina y disminuirán las tasas de abandono.
Doing physical activity carries multiple benefits both physical and psychological (Aparicio, Carbonell y Delgado, 2010); however, when competitive sports practice is being carried out, the athletes can find themselves with less favoring situations such as pressure, coach demands and a psychologically challenging, environment that may conduce them to stress states (Lucia et al., 2017). The athletes that present stress in their sports practice exteriorize some consequences that may include low quality performance, loss of sleep and appetite, decrease in satisfaction levels for sports training and increase in physical injuries (Abián-Vicén, Báguena y Abián, 2015).
When the stress becomes chronic it becomes as predictor of burnout syndrome in sports (De Francisco, Arce, Vílcheza y Vales, 2016). Also, these consequences may result significative not only in sports training but in the personal life of the athletes, therefore, is important make an intervention for these athletes to avoid reaching chronic stressful states. However, there is little information on the factors that cause stress in child athletes because most of the research in the field has been developed in an older population that practices high-performance sports (Ramírez, 2015), so it isn’t appropriate to use this foundation with children because their development stage is different and stress could have different sources and repercussions.
In order to know the factors that children perceive as stressors in sports, a qualitative research and phenomenological design was carried out, in which four focus groups were carried out, in which a total of 41 children participated. The inclusion criteria to participate were being affiliated with sports centers of the Mexico City government, being between 6 and 12 years old and having participated in at least one competition or tournament. Children who did not want to collaborate or whose parents did not give consent for their participation were excluded.
A comparative analysis was made for the codification and categorization of information that consists of three types of codification: open, axial and selective (Onwuegbuzie, Dickinson, Leech y Zoran, 2011). After the open codification analysis, five preliminary categories were detected, later, in the axial codification, the judges agreed that the five categories of stressors that the children reported were produced in two different contexts: training and competition, so these two were classified as the two major categories. Finally, after the axial coding, every one of these two major categories stayed conformed by five the subcategories: personal situations, coaches, peers, family and external situations. Every subcategory consists of various factors that produce stress to children.
In training, the factors that children mentioned are the demands and favoritism by the coach; also to experiment negative emotions like fear, anger or frustration; lack of time to do recreational and academic activities; extreme physical tiredness; negative interaction with peers, violence or exclusion between peers, the demand of satisfactory results by their relatives and the perception of lack of infrastructure for suitable training.
In the competitive context, children report that suffering negative emotions generated by the pressure of competition, concerns about their performance in the contest, unpredictable situations such as accidents or delays, uneasiness about the performance of other competitors, and being exposed to the judgments that people who attend the competition will make, were the factors that children consider as generators of stress.
In future research, it will be advisable to take into account the time that children have been practicing the sport, since it is possible that the perception of stress changes with the years of training. We can also evaluate in groups of children who are at the same age, since the maturation process progresses rapidly during childhood. It will also be worth differentiating between individual and team sports athletes.
