Item-Level Stress and Coping Responses Improve Prediction of Perceived Performance in Collegiate Volleyball Players

This project contains the research materials, analytical code, and supporting outputs for a study examining competitive stress, coping responses, and perceived performance among collegiate volleyball players in Ghana. The study investigates whether preserving item-level information from athletes’ reported sources of stress and coping responses improves the prediction of perceived performance under stress compared with conventional aggregate stress and coping scores. Analyses include psychometric and data-quality assessment, conventional aggregate-score modelling, regularized item-level prediction using ridge and elastic-net regression, repeated cross-validation, model benchmarking, and sensitivity analyses. The project is intended to support transparent and reproducible reporting of the study and its associated research article.