TENDENCY OF VIOLENCE IN TEAM SPORTS ATHLETES: A SCALE DEVELOPMENT STUDY

Abstract

In the review of the literature on violence in sports, violence in sports is generally addressed with elements such as the relationship between violence in society and sports culture, factors affecting violence and aggression, fan violence and fanaticism, football and violence. It was also seen that scale adaptation or development studies are carried out to determine perceptions, attitudes, and tendencies for violence in different education, age, gender and sportsman groups. For this reason, by the current study, it was aimed to develop a multidimensional scale to determine the tendencies of athletes involved in team sports towards physical, verbal, and emotional violence, and it was tried to fill a gap in the literature. The research group of this study consists of 293 amateur and professional athletes between the ages of 18 and 41 who are interested in team sports and under license. By examining the literature on violence tendency, a pool of 41 items was created. The item pool was sent to 5 different people who are experts in their field for content validity, and 8 items were decided to be excluded from the scale pool after expert opinions. And the 33-item scale form was applied to licensed people in team sports. Varimax rotation was performed in the exploratory factor analysis during the scale development process, and 16 items with a factor load below 0.30 were removed from the scale draft. The scale items were collected in three dimensions as physical violence, verbal violence and emotional violence. The variance explained by the scale was found to be %44.977. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed to verify the three-dimensional structure of the scale after exploratory factor analysis (EFA). CFA results show that the scale is within acceptable limits. Cronbach's alpha value was found as .848 in the physical violence tendency dimension, .808 in the verbal violence tendency dimension and .734 in the emotional violence tendency dimension. It was concluded that “the violence tendency scale in team sports" developed with the present study is a valid and reliable measurement tool and it can be used to determine the violence tendency levels of athletes who are in team sports.