Participation incentives among US adult, US youth, and Polish adult wheelchair basketball players

Abstract

Wheelchair basketball may be the world’s oldest and most popular team sport for persons with a physical disability. At present, there are at least eight major international tournaments as well as zonal qualifying tournaments for the Paralympic Games and the Men’s and Women’s Gold Cup under the auspices of the International Wheelchair Basketball Federation. There were two purposes of this study. The first was to evaluate the participation motives of Polish wheelchair basketball players and the second was to compare the participation motives of Polish and American wheelchair basketball players. Data for this study were obtained from two sources: men and women who participated on Polish wheelchair basketball teams and data reported in studies by Brasile and Hedrick.1 In general, the results indicate that the incentives for participation in wheelchair basketball across these samples of players are more similar than dissimilar. The groups have similar mean scores and standard deviations for the task-oriented incentives. Future research may address whether American or European wheelchair basketball players have more similar participation motives than players from Africa, Asia, Australia, or South America or that the participants in noncompetitive sports or extreme sports have similar motives.