Originally developed by Butler (1989) with the Great Britain Olympic boxing team, performance profiling is an assessment tool primarily used by sport psychologists to enhance athlete awareness (Butier, 1989, 1997; Butler & Hardy, 1992; Butler, Smith, & Irwin, 1993). Through an understanding of selected principles of personal construct theory (Kelly, 1955), Butler and Hardy (1992) developed a client-centered performance assessment technique that asks athletes (either individually or as part of a group) to identify the qualities essential to their performance and then rate themselves on those qualities. The completed profile provides the athlete, the coach, and psychologist with a visual representation of the athlete's perception of his or her performance and hence can be used as a basis to set goals and structure future training interventions (Butler et al., 1993). Central to the justification for the development of the profiling technique was the important motivational properties of its use. Drawingon Deci and Ryan's (1985) cognitive evaluation theory (CET), Butler and Hardy (1992) proposed that the profile's athlete-centered approach to performance assessment would facilitate greater intrinsic motivation in athletes. CET asserts that social and environmental factors (e.g., coach behavior, rewards) that reinforce an individual's perception of autonomy, competence, and relatedness will facilitate higher levels of self-determined motivation, which in turn will bring about more positive behavioral, cognitive, and affective outcomes. Examination of the performance profiling procedure suggests that it may be useful in improving athletes' intrinsic motivation via the three key motivational mediators. First, the athlete's perceived autonomy may be positively influenced by the profiling procedure's emphasis on athlete involvement during the performance assessment phase (Butler & Hardy, 1992). Furthennore, when repeated over time, profiling could help reinforce improvements on key performance attributes and thereby improve athletes' perceptions of competence (Butler et al., 1993). Finally, the group nature of the profiling procedure could help to facilitate greater perceptions of relatedness as athletes communicate, interact, and discuss performance-related issues with fellow teammates (Dale &Wrisberg, 1996). Despite the clear theoretical rationale for the influence of profiling on athletes' intrinsic motivation, little research has been published on this topic. In his individual consultancy, Jones (1993) stated that his athlete's motivation to begin and adhere to a subsequent cognitive behavioral intervention had resulted from the initial performance profiling procedure. Similarly D'Urso, Petrosso, and Robazza (2002), in their application of the profiling procedure with rugby union players, stated that the athletes believed profiling had helped to increase their achievement motivation. Although these research findings provide some support for the use of profiling in improving athlete motivation, the findings are limited in number and descriptive in nature, and they fail to examine empirically the influence of performance profiling on athletes' intrinsic motivation. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to examine the impact of a repeated performance-profiling intervention on athletes' intrinsic motivation (IM) using an experimental design. Athletes were randomly assigned to three groups: (a) a sport science educational intervention (three repeat interactive seminar sessions covering various sport science topics); (b) control condition (athletes continued as normal with no intervention); and (c) performance profiling intervention (three repeat profiling sessions). We examined three a priori hypotheses: (a) given Vallerand's (2001) proposition that social factors must be repeatedly reinforced within the same context in order to positively influence contextual motivation, a single profiling session would be insufficient to significantly improve athletes' IM; (b) three profiling sessions over the course of 6 weeks would significantly improve IM; and (c) three repeat profiling sessions over the course of 6 weeks would significantly improve IM in comparison to the two control conditions.
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