Iranian Elite Athlete's Lifestyles (Providing a Grounded Theory)

Today, elite athlete’s lifestyle is at the center of public attention. The goal of this qualitative study reproduces the concept of Iranian elite athlete’s lifestyles by using Glaserian Approach of Grounded Theory to be done. Glaserian Approach wants to discover main concern of participants and basic social process to solve it. For this purpose, 19 experts aware of the Iranian athletes’ lifestyle selected by targeted and snowball for depth unstructured interviews and the data simultaneously analyzed by using a set of open, theoretical, selective coding and memos. The validity and reliability of research were evaluated with confirmation of findings by four participants. The results showed that the main concern of participants was “lack of professional in Iranian athlete’s life, the core category of study was “Professional Thinking” and the basic social process was “moving towards Professionalism”. Emotional Competencies, Life Visions, Financial Literacy, Responsibility, Consumption, Leisure, Personal Issues and Religious Behaviors were determined other categories of lifestyle that are affected by professional thinking. The categories of basic social process classified in three levels of macro, meso and micro that can fix the main concern of participants over time. Overall, elite athlete lifestyle is a guide for action in sport and non-sport issue of life. The findings can be applied for examine different aspects of elite athletes’ lifestyle such as effective factors and objective components.