A fish in or out of water: understanding the identity construction and campus life experiences of Chinese student athletes Xiangyu Chen (a, b), Xiaoqian Richard Hu (a)
a) The Division of Sports Science and Physical Education, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
b) The School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing
100084, China
Abstract
This study aims to investigate the identity construction of Chinese student athletes of Tsinghua University, in which Olympic gold medallists were developed in a way that is unorthodox in the government-run Chinese elite sport system, with a focus on the relationship among the context, identity, and life experiences of Tsinghua student athletes. Drawing on the Constructivist Grounded Theory, qualitative data, collected through 20 semi-structured interviews with student athletes and administrators of the Tsinghua varsity team, is analysed via a two-phrase process, embracing initial coding and focused coding. As the result of data analysis, there emerges a substantive theory consisting of two paths that elaborate the relationship among three core categories, namely Tsinghua context, the self-construction of student-athletes^ identities and the campus life experiences. More specifically, the first path elucidates the way in which student athletes perceive campus life experiences based on their understanding of Tsinghua and the constructed identity as student athletes, and the second clarifies how student athletes construe, maintain, and enhance their own identity through interpreting their campus life experiences in Tsinghua. Enlightened by a Bourdieusian theory, our discussion provides a deliberation of the two-fold role of the Tsinghua context, which both constrains and facilitates the interplay between the self-construction of student-athletes^ identity and their perception of campus life in emotional and behavioural dimensions. This study is concluded with a brief reflection of the position Chinese student athletes in the powerful relationship of the Chinese elite sport and education system.
Keywords: student athletes- identity- self construction- life experiences- Bourdieu
