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Interdependence And Interpersonal Influence Among Individual Sport Teammates, Blair Evans

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

As an exploration of the nature of groups and interpersonal influence within individual sport teams, this dissertation combined qualitative, correlational, and experimental methods. A qualitative study was first conducted with fourteen elite individual sport athletes who participated in interviews exploring their sport experiences with teammates. Athletes suggested that teammates were a primary source of motivation, social facilitation, social comparisons, and teamwork. Athletes also described how concepts such as cohesion and competitiveness acted as determinants of interpersonal influence and commented on how these concepts related to group structures. Qualitative reflections formed the basis for the subsequent conceptual paper that identified four …