THE EVALUATION OF MENTAL ABILITIES OF ATHLETES IN DIFFERENT BRANCHES

Abstract

This paper aims to evaluate the levels of mental ability of licensed athletes who are actively engaged in sports at branch level in Turkey. A total of 340 athletes, including 116 women and 224 men, from various regions of Turkey who are actively engaged in sports at elite level in different branches voluntarily participated in the survey which evaluates their levels and techniques of mental training. It was considered important that athletes participated in the survey should be licensed and importance of the study was emphasized to them. The survey model was used in this study. Current information related to research problem was systematically given by scanning of relevant literature, so a theoretical framework on the subject was created. First of all, a twelve-question personal information form developed by researcher was applied. Ottawa Mental Skills Assessment tool (OMSAT-3) which is developed by Durand-Bush, Salmela and Green-Demers (2001) and adapted to Turkish language by Erhan, Guler, Agduman and Gerek was applied to evaluate the levels of athletes’ mental ability. In the adaptation phase, the scale was applied to 220 athletes and internal consistency value was found to be 0.94. The scale consists of 48 items and 12 subscales and these subscales are evenly divided into four items. The scale consists of a total of 48 items and constructed on a 7-point Likert-type. The scoring was formed from 1 to 7 according to the statements, “Strongly disagree”, “Disagree”, “Slightly disagree”, “Neither agree nor disagree”, “Agree”, “Slightly agree” and “Strongly agree”. Frequency Analysis was applied to determine the demographic characteristics of participants and Shapiro-Wilk Test was applied in order to decide whether the questionnaires are suitable to normal distribution and Mann-Whitney U test was applied in order to determine the dimensions according to parameters such as gender, marital status, and type of sports, level of contact and level of sport. Kruskal-Wallis H test was applied for analysis of the dimensions in terms of age, sports age and educational level. Finally, correlation analysis of Spearman was used in order to determine the relation between sub-dimensions of total satisfaction score. The significance level (p<0.05) was accepted in analysis. As a result, there is a significant difference in mental ability dimensions of active athletes in different branches according to their mental ability levels and variables such as age, type of sports, sports level and sports age. Therefore, it is observed that mental ability levels of athletes in different branches vary according to these variables. Article visualizations: