A pilot study of a sport-specific projective method: The athlete apperception technique

Abstract Purpose Nowadays, projective methods play an important role in psychodiagnostics when it comes to understanding clients' personalities, because they allow the therapist to get to know the clients' subconscious conflicts, desires and motivations. Measuring and understanding an athlete's psychological state is key to an effective and successful intervention and performance enhancement, for which the athlete apperception technique (AAT) is a perfect tool. The AAT is a projective technique that portrays sport-specific themes. This study aimed to introduce this sport-specific projective method to the Hungarian sport science and to determine the possibilities it could provide during the sport psychodiagnostic work or the sport psychological counselling. Methods For our study, we used the 10 basic images of the AAT, and we had a total of 11 16-year-old and older Hungarian athlete participants. The analysis of the responses to the images was performed through theory-driven content analysis. Results Regarding the appearance of the manifest themes in general, in all images, at least two types of themes could be identified in the answers, but in five pictures, certain themes did not appear in any of the answers. In the case of two images, the participants' stories reflected on the latent themes of the images, not the manifest ones. Conclusions The use of AAT in the sport environment offers great possibilities, especially to the applied sport psychologists since it makes it easier to understand the psychodynamic characteristics, motivation and anxieties of athletes and coaches.