Internal and external attributions for sporting success and failure (Sports Coverage)
Authors: Vögele Catharina , Schäfer Markus 
Published: April 2021

The variable "Internal and external attributions for sporting success and failure” deals with the question which causal explanations media reporting gives for success or failure of athletes or sports teams. It identifies which attributions sports journalists and other stakeholders involved in sports events use to explain the performance of athletes and teams in their reporting.

Field of application/theoretical foundation:
The reasons for sporting failure and success are often identified in the analysis of media coverage about sporting events- for example, in the analysis of live commentary during sports broadcasts or of match and competition reports. The theoretical foundation is attribution theory (e.g. Heider, 1958). Its general aim is to explain and justify actions of individuals (Möller, 1994). With regard to sporting competition, it is about attributions in performance situations and the question which factors can explain the success or failure of a team or athlete (Möller, 1994; Weiner, 1985, 1986). It is assumed that individuals, when explaining their own success or failure, proceed in such a way that their self-esteem does not suffer. Therefore, they tend to explain their own success more by referring to internal factors related to their personal characteristics such as their athletic or mental strength, whereas failures tend to be explained by external factors beyond their control such as luck, bad luck or refereeing (Strauss, Senkse & Tietjens, 2009). This attribution pattern is referred to as "self-serving bias" and has already been identified in the coverage of sporting events and the statements of sports actors integrated in the reporting (e.g. Lau & Russell, 1980; Peterson, 1980). Some studies also analyze whether the explanation of failure and success in media reporting differs depending on whether the focus is on female or male athletes (e.g. Duncan & Messner, 1990; Eastman & Billings, 1999; Möller, 1993a; Klein, 1986; Rulofs, 2003) or whether athletes of one's own nationality or of other nationalities are rated (e.g. Möller, 1993ab; Möller & Strauss, 1997).

References/combination with other methods of data collection:
Combinations with survey methods are not common in previous research. However, it would be useful to interview athletes in order to compare their statements in mass media coverage and their survey responses explaining their performance.

Example study:
The example category is from a study by Rulofs (2003), who conducted a quantitative content analysis of the coverage of the 1999 World Athletics Championships in German national quality newspapers and a special-interest journal to analyze how mass media presents female athletes compared to male athletes. Among other things, the study also analyzed which reasons were given in the reporting to explain success and failure of athletes, whereby a distinction was made between internal and external explanatory factors. The factors listed here are those from the original published codebook of the study (Rulofs, 2003, pp. 248, 250, 268). They were partially summarized by the authors of this database contribution and the numerical codes were slightly changed for reasons of clarity. Since the codebook does not contain more detailed explanations of the individual factors of the category, we added explanations. Rulofs (2003) does not give separate reliability scores for individual categories of the content analysis, but she does point out that overall "in the entire category system, depending on the degree of difficulty of individual categories, an agreement of at least 80% was achieved" (p. 68).

Code

Ausprägung

10

Sportliche Fähigkeiten (internal)

11

Ausdauer

12

Kondition

13

Koordination

14

Kraft

15

Schnelligkeit

16

Technik

17

Verletzung/körperliche Schwäche

20

Psychische Fähigkeiten/Charakter (internal)

21

Charakter/Persönlichkeit

22

Einstellung

23

Erfahrung

24

Intelligenz

25

Kampfgeist

26

Konzentration

27

Motivation

28

Nerven

29

Psyche

30

Risikobereitschaft

31

Selbstbewusstsein

32

Sensibilität/Einfühlungsvermögen

33

Siegeswillen

34

Taktik

35

Kooperation

50

Training/Vorbereitung (internal)

60

Externe Faktoren (external)

61

Äußere Bedingungen

62

Partner/in

63

Glück

64

Material/Kleidung/Sportgeräte

65

Publikum

66

Schwäche des Gegners/der Gegnerin

67

Trainer/in

68

Verein/Verband

69

Doping

99

Sonstige Faktoren

References
Duncan, M. C., & Messner, M. A. (1990). Gender Stereotyping in televised sports. Los Angeles: The Amateur Athletic Foundation.
Eastman, S. T., & Billings, A. C. (1999). Gender parity in the Olympics. Hyping women athletes, favoring men athletes. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 23(2), 140-170.
Heider, F. (1958). The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. New York: Wiley.
Klein, M. (1986). Frauensport in der Tagespresse. Eine Untersuchung zur sprachlichen und bildlichen Präsentation von Frauen in der Sportberichterstattung. Bochum: Universitätsverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer.
Lau, R. R., & Russell, D. (1980). Attributions in the sports pages. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(1), 29-38.
Möller, J. (1993a). Attributionen in Massenmedien: Zum Einfluß nationaler Gruppenzugehörigkeit, Gruppengröße und Geschlecht auf spontane Ursachenzuschreibungen. Bonn: Halos Verlag.
Möller, J. (1993b). Zur Ausdifferenzierung des Paradigmas "Spontane Attributionen": Eine empirische Analyse zeitlich unmittelbarer Ursachenzuschreibungen. Zeitschrift für Sozialpsychologie, 24, 129-136.
Möller, J. (1994). Attributionsforschung im Sport - ein Überblick (Teil 1). Psychologie und Sport: Zeitschrift für Sportpsychologie, (3), 82-93.
Möller, J., & Strauss, B. (1997). Before and after the German reunification: Changes in observers' commentaries on achievements in a natural experiment. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 27(1), 75-93.
Peterson, C. (1980). Attribution in the sports pages: An archival investigation of the covariation hypothesis. Social Psychology Quarterly, 43 (1), 136-141.
Rulofs, B. (2003). Konstruktion von Geschlechterdifferenzen in der Sportpresse? Eine Analyse der Berichterstattung zur Leichtathletik WM 1999. Butzbach-Griedel: Afra-Verlag.
Strauss, B., Senske, S., & Tietjens, M. (2009). Attributionen in Sportkommentaren. In H. Schramm & M. Marr (Hrsg.), Die Sozialpsychologie des Sports in den Medien (S. 74-92). Köln: Herbert von Halem Verlag.
Weiner, B. (1985). An attributional theory of achievement motivation and emotion. Psychological Review, 92(4), 548–573.
Weiner, B. (1986). An attributional theory of motivation and emotion. New York: Springer.