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Abstract

Stressors related to academic requisites, sport participation and pressure to perform may increase college athlete risk for mental health symptoms (Cox, Ross-Stewart, & Foltz, 2017; Sudano & Miles, 2017; Yang et al., 2007). The purpose of this study was to identify the level of clinically relevant self-reported mental health symptoms in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division III athletes and variations based on sport participation (i.e., men’s or women’s athletics; team or individual sports) over a two-year period. A nonexperimental, trend study design was used. Data analysis included descriptive statistics, chi square test, and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) which used one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) for follow-up procedures. A MANOVA revealed a significant interaction of gender and sport type for general symptoms [F(1, 564) = 9.583, p = .002] and depression [F(1, 564) = 6.945, p = .009] but not anxiety [F(1, 564) = 3.332, p = .068, ƞ2 = .006]. The project was able to describe mental health symptoms in a population that is not often included in the literature. Knowledge of collegiate athlete mental health prevalence is important because prevention and early intervention is a key component of community-based health programming.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.25035/jade.04.01.04

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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