Are Men Ballers and Women Scholars? The Role of Hypermasculinity, Gender, and Athletic Identity on Student-Athletes' Academic Performance

Narine, Victoria Rose

Are Men Ballers and Women Scholars? The Role of Hypermasculinity, Gender, and Athletic Identity on Student-Athletes' Academic Performance

Files

Narine_hawii_0085A_10955.pdf (1.89 MB)

Date

2021

Authors

Narine, Victoria Rose

Advisor

Pauker, Kristin

Department

Psychology

Abstract

Much of the research on student-athletes’ academic performance has adopted a stereotype threat approach, assigning culpability to stigmatized identities. However, this line of research fails to acknowledge that student-athletes possess multiple identities that may interact, in turn impacting their academic performance. Specifically, this research project focused on an aspect of the male gender identity that may be enhanced by the athletic identity — hypermasculinity. The primary aim of these studies was to determine whether, how, and for whom hypermasculinity negatively impacts academic performance. Study 1 was a correlational study to examine if hypermasculinity and athletic identity were negatively related to academic performance for a sample of male student-athletes. The purpose of Study 2 was to show that male student-athletes’ but not female student-athletes' academic performance was negatively affected because of the desire to confirm shared stereotypes (i.e., conceptual overlap) of their athletic and gender identities. This conceptual overlap between female-school and male-athlete was measured implicitly in Study 2, along with hypermasculinity. Finally, Study 3 experimentally manipulated hypermasculinity in a sample of traditional (non-athlete) students to determine the causal relationship between hypermasculinity and academic performance. Although there was no evidence that athletic identity or hypermasculinity predicted GPA or that athletic identity predicted hypermasculinity in Study 1, exploratory analyses in Study 2 found that hypermasculinity was negatively associated with GPA. Additionally, I found evidence to support the proposed female-school association using two different types of research methods. In a series of exploratory qualitative analyses, I found evidence for a female-school/male-athlete association (Study 1 and Study 2) using both implicit and explicit measures. A preliminary analysis to assess the manipulation in Study 3 indicated that the hypermasculinity manipulation had no effect on hypermasculine attitudes. As a result, my main analysis indicated no mean differences in GRE success rates across the three conditions.

Keywords

Social psychology, academic performance, gender, social identity, student-athlete

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10125/75980

Extent

141 pages

Rights

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Collections

Ph.D. - Psychology

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