In this study we aimed to explore factors associated to Dual Career (DC) satisfaction in Swedish university student-athletes to contribute to the evaluation of the Swedish sports university system. We considered DC satisfaction as a key indicator of the student-athletes` ability to maintain an optimal DC balance in their striving for DC excellence and searched for the factors facilitating this process. Using a repeated cross-sectional design, we sampled participants during three consecutive educational years (2020-2022) using an online survey. We sampled 561 high-performance university student-athletes (54% female) with a mean age of 23.82 (SD = 3.35). The student-athletes represented all universities and 54 sports federations in the Swedish sports university system. We performed a Chi-squared Autonatic Interaction Detection (CHAID) analysis to test the potential relationships between independent variables (i.e., DC coping, DC competences, DC support, mental health, autonomy, competence and relatedness support, perception of study and sport flexibility, gender, hours worked alongside DC, and years of study at university) and the dependent variable (i.e., DC satisfaction). Our findings showed that the factors related to DC satisfaction were student-athletes` DC coping (i.e., their ability to cope with interrelated sport, study, and private life challenges), together with receiving relevant DC support and experiencing relatedness. Taken together, this points towards the importance in creating DC development environments (DCDEs) characterised by individualised empowerment support (i.e., complementing student-athletes coping efforts and adding to their DC competences) and strong peer-relationships with relatedness in a community of student-athletes.
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