Impact of Human Factors on Sport Performance across Different Developmental Stages of National Athletes in Sri Lanka

Abstract

This research study was combined both factors as ‘human factors’ and its impacts on sport performance. The human factors are relating to the interrelation of social factors and individual thought and behaviour. The Sri Lankan explorations, there has been a majority of explorations of the social dimension and psychology aspect. But a limited investigation was carried on the relationship with human factors and sport performance. The objective of this study was to investigate human factors and its influence in successful and poor sport performance across difference development stages of national level athletes. Twenty five national athletes (N=25) have taken part in the study sample. The semi-structured interviews were conducted in order to collect data. Thematic analysis was used to analysing data and focus on examining themes within data. The collected information was preferred into three parts and eight categories. The research has revealed that the human factors were contributed to the successful sport performance and poor sport performance evenly during initiation, development, mastery phases and maintenance stages. The impact of parents, family, coach, peers, siblings and other factors was studied among difference life stages. The results were presented that the human factorsplay a different role in the difference development stages. The instance supportive family and parents were the most important factors to National athletes’ successful sport performance on the initiation stage, where the lack of family and coach support to be a more important factor to National athlete’s poor sport performance on the maintenance stage. The research was recommended on future research and implication are given.