Conceptualising Mental Toughness in the Military Domain

摘要: Background: There is growing interest in the research community into ‘mental toughness’ as a factor that contributes to successful performance in a variety of achievement settings (for a review, see Gucciardi & Gordon, in press). To date, most of this research has been conducted in the sporting domain and primarily characterises mental toughness in terms of the ability to handle pressure, remain focussed, and display high levels of belief, motivation, and resilience in stressful situations (eg, Jones et al, 2002; 2007; Middleton et al, 2004). In recent years, there has also been a growing interest in the concept of mental toughness in military settings within Australia (Australian Department of Defence, 2007; Cohn & Pakenham, 2008; Mathieson, 2009) and overseas (Lopez, 2009; US Army, 2010). Despite growing recognition of its importance for military personnel, there have been no studies, to our knowledge, that have adequately addressed the conceptualisation of military mental toughness. The aim of this study was to address this gap in the literature and improve our understanding of mental toughness in this domain.Theoretical Framework: Given the exploratory nature of the study, a grounded theory approach was employed in conjunction with the Revised Performance Profile technique (Butler, 1991; Gucciardi & Gordon, 2009) to explore participants’ conceptualisation of mental toughness (see Gucciardi, Gordon, & Dimmock, 2009). This technique stems from a personal construct psychology framework (Kelly, 1991) and asks participants to describe constructs in bipolar terms, thereby facilitating explanations in terms of what something is and what …