Psychological Well-Being in Amateur Tennis and Golf Athletes: The Roles of Performance Anxiety, Sport Type, Age, and Gender

Abstract

Performance anxiety is widely reported among competitive athletes, yet little research has examined how demographic factors jointly relate to depressive symptoms and multidimensional sport anxiety in amateur, non-elite populations. This cross-sectional study examined the associations between sport type (tennis, golf, or both), age, gender, and self-reported depression and competitive sport anxiety among 30 amateur tennis and golf athletes (24 men, 6 women; age range 19–58 years) recruited via convenience sampling from the United States, India, and Singapore. Participants completed the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and the Sport Anxiety Scale-2 (SAS-2), which yields Somatic Anxiety, Worry, and Concentration Disruption subscales. All four psychological variables violated the assumption of normality (Shapiro-Wilk ps < .05), so non-parametric tests, 95% confidence intervals, and both observed and a priori statistical power analyses accompanied all primary analyses. Sport type was not significantly associated with depression or any anxiety dimension in one-way analyses of variance or corroborating Kruskal-Wallis tests, although observed power for these comparisons was low. Age showed no significant correlation with any study variable. Women, however, reported significantly higher somatic anxiety than men on independent-samples t tests (d = 1.12, observed power = .66), with a similar but more test-dependent pattern for worry. Depressive symptoms, contrary to expectation, were not significantly correlated with any SAS-2 subscale, although the three anxiety subscales were strongly intercorrelated with one another. Within this small amateur sample, then, gender — rather than sport type, age, or depressive symptomatology — was the demographic variable most consistently associated with competitive sport anxiety, though the low power of several tests means these null findings should be
treated as inconclusive rather than confirmatory. Limitations related to sample size, statistical power, gender imbalance, and convenience sampling are discussed alongside directions for future research.