Sports Participation as a Protective Factor against Anxiety and Academic Stress in Pakistani Adolescents: The Mediating Role of Self-Esteem

Abstract

Academic anxiety and academic stress are important school-related psychological concerns during adolescence. Organized sport may provide mastery experiences, competence feedback, and repeated opportunities for successful performance that strengthen self-esteem, a plausible intrapersonal mechanism linking sport with better psychological adjustment. This study examined associations of organized sports participation with academic anxiety and academic stress among Pakistani adolescent student-athletes and evaluated self-esteem as a mediator. A cross-sectional predictive-correlational design was specified. The analytical sample comprised 362 student-athletes (181 males, 181 females), aged 13-18 years and enrolled in Grades 9-12, recruited through multistage stratified cluster sampling from BISE-affiliated schools in Bahawalpur, Dera Ghazi Khan, and Multan divisions. Sports participation was represented by a researcher-adapted Sports Participation Index; academic anxiety by the Academic Anxiety Scale; academic stress by the available Academic Stress Scale items; and self-esteem by the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations, regression, and mediation were used. Sports participation was negatively correlated with academic anxiety (r = -.244, p < .001) and academic stress (r = -.168, p = .001) and positively correlated with self-esteem (r = .197). Self-esteem was negatively related to academic anxiety (r = -.349) and academic stress (r = -.412). Re-specification as a single-mediator model yielded point-estimated indirect associations through self-esteem of B = -0.070 for academic anxiety and B = -0.360 for academic stress; these estimates require bootstrap verification using the actual raw dataset. The observed pattern is consistent with an intrapersonal pathway in which organized sport is associated with lower school-related psychological strain partly through more favorable self-evaluation. Longitudinal, multilevel, and intervention research is required before causal protection can be inferred.