The Use of an Imagery Education Program to Enhance Imagery Use, Self-Efficacy and Return to Sport Time in Athletes with a Sport Related Injury.

摘要

Almost every athlete will experience at least one sport related injury (SRI) during his or her career in sport. Because of these injuries, there is often a period of time that the athlete is removed from play and forced to complete a rehabilitation program. In order to enhance this rehabilitation process, researchers have investigated various mental skills used by athletes to enhance their recovery process. Two of the areas that research has reviewed in terms of injury rehabilitation have been imagery and self-efficacy. However, there is a lack of research in which an imagery education intervention has been implemented to see how athletes in a rehabilitation program respond in terms of their imagery use, levels of self-efficacy, and speed of recovery. Therefore, this study investigated the use of an imagery education program, and its effect on athletes' imagery use, self-efficacy and rehabilitation time. This was done through the use of the Athletic Injury Imagery Questionnaire-2 (AIIQ-2) and the Athletic Injury Self-Efficacy Questionnaire (AISEQ). Due to a high attrition rate in participation, inferential statistics were not able to be conducted in order to truly assess the effectiveness of the imagery education program. However, other conclusions were drawn based on the completion rates and various variables that may have affected those rates. The study found that female, freshman were most likely to complete the entire study, while male juniors were least likely to complete the requirements of the study.