Role conflict and the female athlete: Preoccupations with little grounding

The potential role conflict which girls and women experience as a result of their athletic participation has been a subject of scholarly inquiry by sport social scientists for some time. Early writers discussed the types of social and psychological pressures exerted on female athletes as societal images, definitions, and expectations of being an athlete collided with those of being a woman. Role conflict has been and continues to be a popular conceptual approach used by both sport sociologists and sport psychologists to describe the apparent dilemmas which the female athlete must confront. This paper: (a) reviews sociological and psychological research findings on role conflict and the female athlete, (b) discusses conceptual and methodological problems extant in much of this research, and (c) discusses implications of this line of inquiry for both researchers and practitioners in the field of applied sport psychology.