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Personality, self-efficacy and risk-taking in parkour (free-running)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2013.03.001Get rights and content

Highlights

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    Risk-taking in sport has been associated with personality and self-efficacy.

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    Practitioners of the high-risk sport parkour/free-running were surveyed.

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    Big Five personality traits, self-efficacy and risk-taking in parkour were assessed.

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    Greater reckless risk-taking was associated with high neuroticism and low conscientiousness.

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    Self-efficacy mediated effects of neuroticism and conscientiousness on risk-taking.

Abstract

Objective

To assess the effect of self-efficacy on the relationship between personality and risk-taking in parkour/free-running, a growing high-risk sport.

Design

Quantitative cross-sectional study.

Method

277 parkour and free-running practitioners were recruited online to complete a survey assessing Big Five personality traits, self-efficacy and perceived risk-taking.

Results

Greater reckless risk-taking behaviours were associated with high neuroticism (p = .013) and low conscientiousness (p = .004). Mediation analysis showed that self-efficacy exerted a significant (95% CI) indirect mediation on the relationship between personality traits of neuroticism and conscientiousness, and risk-taking. Extraversion did not predict risk-taking, and was not significantly mediated by self-efficacy.

Conclusions

Self-efficacy plays a significant mediation role in the relationship between stable traits of neuroticism and conscientiousness, and risk-taking amongst parkour/free-running practitioners. This may help elucidate reasons underlying risky sports behaviours.

Section snippets

Participants and procedure

Participants were traceurs and free-runners recruited through the Parkour Generations website (www.parkourgenerations.com). The survey was voluntary and conducted online. 384 people gave informed consent to participate. Of these, 107 (27.9%) provided incomplete data, leaving 277 participants' data for analysis. The sample comprised predominantly male participants (n = 242, 87.4%), amongst whom the sport is more popularly practiced. Participants ranged from 16 to 41 years old, although the

Data analysis

PaSES responses ranged from 81 to 1000 (M = 723.15, SD = 154.56). Reliability analysis of PaSES responses yielded a Cronbach's α of 0.90, showing good internal consistency. Risk-taking behaviour scale responses (N = 277) ranged from 3 to 13 (M = 5.65, SD = 1.96), and mean inter-item correlation was acceptable at 0.21 (Briggs & Cheek, 1986).

As expected, there were small, but significant, correlations between neuroticism and conscientiousness and risk-taking (Table 1). No other Big Five

Discussion

To our knowledge, this was the first study to apply Big Five trait theory to the sport of parkour/free-running. Results were in line with previous work that identified low conscientiousness and high neuroticism as key Big Five traits associated with greater self-reported risk-taking behaviours in extreme sports (Castanier et al., 2010). Conscientiousness and neuroticism were found to be significantly mediated by self-efficacy in their effects on risk-taking. Though no high-risk sports studies

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank David Llewellyn, Trevor Thompson, Andrew Cooper, and Parkour Generations, particularly Dan Edwardes.

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