Athletes’ mental skills, personality and other drivers to assess the performance in a study on volleyball

Several studies investigating the relationship among sports performance, personality and athletes' mental skills have suggested the positive relationship between self-esteem and conscientiousness to identify higher performance and a low level of neuroticism to predict their athletic success (see Allen et al. (2013), among others). This work is aimed at studying personality measured with the five-factor inventory (Costa and McCrae, 1992) and mental skills assessed through the sport performance psychological inventory (IPPS-48) (Robazza et al., 2009), and how they can successfully affect the performance of team athletes. Moreover, measured with Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965), the self-esteem was considered to evaluate the athletes’ unidimensional feeling about the self in the sport context. The analysis was based on a mixture model that allows identifying the level of feeling of respondents and possible heterogeneity in the responses (Piccolo, 2003). It is about a sample of young female athletes enrolled in women’s volleyball teams of several Series. By using the mixture model we explored not only some psychological traits that reveal new elements to assess the performance but also other drivers as the practice of other sports or time dedicated to the study, among others.