Perfectionism and self-worth among college student basketball referees: the chain mediating roles of self-efficacy and social anxiety.

BACKGROUND: Basketball referees work under rapid, physically demanding, and publicly evaluated conditions that may intensify perfectionistic concerns, including zero-error expectations, sensitivity to external evaluation, and recurrent self-doubt. Evidence remains limited on how perfectionism is statistically associated with self-worth in college student basketball referees and whether self-efficacy and social anxiety account for this association in sequence. METHODS: A cross-sectional questionnaire survey was completed by 860 college student basketball referees aged 18-22 years from Sichuan, Chongqing, Guizhou, and Yunnan; 66.0% were male and all had at least 1 year of refereeing experience. Participants completed measures of perfectionism, self-worth, self-efficacy, and social anxiety, and the reported total scores were used in the primary analyses. Serial mediation associations were examined with SPSS PROCESS Model 6 and 5,000 bootstrap samples. RESULTS: Perfectionism correlated negatively with self-worth (r = -0.354) and self-efficacy (r = -0.340), and positively with social anxiety (r = 0.342); self-efficacy correlated positively with self-worth (r = 0.428) and negatively with social anxiety (r = -0.405), whereas social anxiety correlated negatively with self-worth (r = -0.523). The total effect of perfectionism on self-worth was -0.2517 [95% CI (-0.2984, -0.2050)], and the direct effect remained significant after the mediators were included [-0.1313, 95% CI (-0.1781, -0.0845)]. All three indirect associations were significant because their bootstrap confidence intervals excluded zero: via self-efficacy, via social anxiety, and via the serial self-efficacy-to-social-anxiety pathway. CONCLUSIONS: Higher perfectionism was associated with lower self-worth among college student basketball referees, and self-efficacy and social anxiety showed significant independent and sequential indirect associations. Because the direct effect remained significant, the findings support partial rather than full mediation. The results identify potentially useful training targets, but longitudinal or experimental studies are required before causal or intervention effects can be established.