surveying of causal attributions of elite and sub – elite male athletes in individual sports(from the perspective of athletes and coaches)

attribution theory is one of the psychological dynamic theories that explainsand describes people's perception of facts. therefore, the aim of this research wasto study success and failure attributions in athletes and coaches. the population ofthis study consisted of athletes and coaches of national teams (elite) and clubteams (sub–elite) in swimming, badminton, karate, taekwondo, table tennis andwrestling. 120 male players and 12 coaches were selected through multistageconvenience sampling method. then, data were collected by attribution stylesquestionnaire (asq). the data were analyzed by multivariate anova at p˂0.05.the findings showed that elite athletes expressed more unstable and specificattributions in failure conditions. in contrast, sub–elite athletes expressed morestable and general attributions in failure conditions (p≤0.0001). as well, thecoaches of elite athletes expressed more stable and specific attributions than thecoaches of sub–elite athletes in success dimension (p≤0.0001). the results showedthat the casual attribution of athletes (elite and sub-elite) and their coaches (eliteand sub-elite) expressed elite athletes and coaches' privilege as elite athletesexpressed that most of the reasons for their success were internal, stable andgeneral. also, athletes and coaches stated different attributions in the samesituation. it is recommended that coaches encourage their athletes to attempt moreto express all of their competencies in the competitions.