Anshel, entitled Qualitative Validation of a Model For Coping With Acute Stress In Sports. Explains how stress affects athletes, and how they can go about to deal with the problem, or cope with the problem. The author breaks this down into four categories. First, they want to perceive a stimulus or experiencing an event, secondly, appraising that event as stressful, thirdly, using either approach or avoidance coping strategies each consisting of either cognitive or behavioral strategies, and finally enacting post-coping activity that consists of either remaining on task, reappraising the stressful situation, examining the effectiveness of the coping strategy, or disengaging from further sport participation. .
Stress itself is a widely studied characteristic; it is defined as an interaction between an individual and the surrounding environment. Most research on stress is just new, but has been a topic for the last 20 years. But most new studies on stress have to deal more with the coping process. "Coping is the person's conscious attempt at reducing or managing the demands of a stressful event or expanding the person's resources to deal with the event (Anshel, 2001)." Previous research by Gottlieb (1997) explained "how coping strategies related to acute forms of stress differ from chronic stress, and that many contexts of chronic stress do not end themselves to an event-centered strategy of measuring coping (pg, 12)." While coping research is a more popular study, qualitative research is disregarded. With knowing qualitative research on stress, you can discover the factors causing coping efforts. In one study done by Patton (1990), he took the responses of college athletes about drug behavior among teammates, and why these student athletes would take them (competitive, control weight, overcome boredom) and used these statements to compare to original interview transcripts. There are many studies and views on this topic and with these studies comes new hypothesis and new information, which can be used to explain a person's reaction to a stressful situation in a sport.