ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Sport Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1663002
This article is part of the Research TopicPsychological Factors in Physical Education and Sport - Volume VIView all 38 articles
The Mechanism of Peer Support on the Mental Toughness of Adolescent Swimmers: The Mediating Role of Self-efficacy
Provisionally accepted
- Shandong Sport University, Jinan, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Abstract Objective Current understanding of peer support's role in swimmers' mental toughness development remains limited. Guided by Bandura's social cognitive theory, explores the relationship between peer support and the mental toughness of adolescent swimmers, along with self-efficacy's mediating effect. Methods This study used a quantitative cross-sectional design. A total of 161 adolescent swimmers, aged 10 to 18 years, participated in the research. Data on participants' peer support, self-efficacy, and mental toughness were collected through questionnaire surveys. The data were analyzed using hierarchical linear regression, and mediation effects were tested with the bootstrapping method. Results Studies have shown peer support, self-efficacy, and mental toughness showed significant intercorrelations. Mediation analysis confirmed that self-efficacy fully mediated the relationship between peer support and mental toughness: while peer support initially predicted mental toughness (β = 0.224, p < 0.01), its direct effect diminished (β = 0.107, p > 0.05) when self-efficacy (β = 0.418, p < 0.001) was included. The significant indirect effect via self-efficacy thereby highlights its role as the key mechanism through which peer support enhances mental toughness. Conclusion Research has demonstrated that the presence of peer support is significantly positively correlated with mental toughness. Self-efficacy plays a mediating role between peer support and mental toughness.
Keywords: peer support, Mental toughness, self-efficacy, social cognitive theory, Adolescent swimmers
Received: 10 Jul 2025; Accepted: 10 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Chen, Li and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Haixia Li, 382581114@qq.com
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.