ReviewA systematic review of the experience, occurrence, and controllability of flow states in elite sport
Section snippets
Development of search strategy
The development of a search strategy within a systematic review is an iterative process, essentially refining a strategy from a series of preliminary searches which are evaluated, and discussed and/or reflected upon (Smith, 2010). To begin this review, a list of keywords was created by breaking down the research question (cf. Smith, 2010) and trialled in a preliminary search on the SPORTDiscus database. The returns from this search where then sampled (e.g., every 10th return examined and
General findings
The 17 papers included in this systematic review comprised a total population size of 1194 athletes, made up of 785 males and 409 females. 16 independent samples were included; two of Jackson's studies (1995, 1996) used the same sample of athletes while investigating different topics. In the case of two studies, the whole sample was not included: Canham and Wiley (2003) included an expert and a novice group, so only data relating to the expert group was used; and Bernier, Thienot, Codron, and
The experience of flow in elite sport
The first aim of this systematic review was to summarise existing research exploring how flow states are experienced by elite athletes in order to explore how Csikszentmihalyi's model applies to elite sport. Findings identified aspects of the flow experience in elite athletes and ranked them in order of prevalence between studies (see Table 2). This variance could be explained by the different variables across sporting contexts (such as type of sport), as noted by Jackson (1996). We do not
Conclusion
The exploration of flow in elite sport has only occurred relatively recently, with the first studies published in 1992. Since then, the area has grown and a relatively in-depth description of flow has been developed. Elite athletes experience the nine flow dimensions with varying frequency and research has developed a comprehensive impression of what it is like for these athletes to experience flow (Jackson, 1996). A set of ten factors have been found to influence flow in terms of facilitating,
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the valuable contributions of Sarah Partington, Liz Partington, and Susan Jackson in making up the advisory group. Thanks are also extended to the reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.
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