Psychological predictors of sport dropout in adolescents: a latent profile analysis of risk profiles and R3STEP auxiliary regression.

Understanding why adolescents discontinue organized sport is central to sustaining the physical and mental health benefits of sport participation. Most research has examined psychological correlates of dropout one variable at a time, yet burnout, amotivation, and competitive anxiety may co-occur in meaningful configurations. This study applied a person-centered latent profile analysis (LPA) to identify psychological risk profiles among adolescent athletes and used the R3STEP three-step approach to examine whether dropout status was associated with baseline profile membership over a 12-month follow-up. A total of 864 competitive adolescent athletes (46.5% girls; mean age = 14.6 years, SD = 1.8) from Jiangsu Province, China, completed measures of athlete burnout (emotional/physical exhaustion, reduced sense of accomplishment, sport devaluation), amotivation, and multidimensional competitive anxiety (somatic, worry, concentration disruption). Dropout status was recorded 12 months later. Model selection indices supported a three-profile solution: a low-risk profile (52.8%), characterized by uniformly favorable scores; a moderate-risk profile (33.4%); and a high-risk profile (13.8%), marked by pronounced elevations across all seven indicators. Twelve-month dropout rates rose monotonically across profiles (8.6%, 19.4%, and 35.3%, respectively), χ²(2) = 45.87, p < 0.001. In R3STEP analyses controlling for age, sex, and weekly training hours, dropouts were 3.86 times more likely to belong to the high-risk rather than the low-risk profile (OR = 3.86, p < 0.001) and 1.94 times more likely to belong to the moderate-risk profile (OR = 1.94, p < 0.01). Older age and greater weekly training hours were also associated with higher-risk membership. These findings indicate that burnout, amotivation, and anxiety cluster within identifiable subgroups of adolescent athletes, and that membership in a high-risk psychological profile is strongly associated with subsequent sport dropout. These profiles may inform the future development of risk-assessment approaches for retaining adolescent athletes, pending prospective validation of their predictive performance.