The Effect of Sports on the Psychological Well-being Levels of High School Students

Abstract

The aim of this study is to examine the effect of sports education on psychological well-being levels of high school students in terms of individual, environmental and self-determination.

This study group consists oftotally 187 high school students, in other words 97 students (n_male = 48, n_female= 49) receive education in a high school attached to Provincial National Education Directorate of Konya where they are provided for sports training, while 90 students (n_male= 50, n_female= 40) receive education in a similar school where they are not provided for sports training in the first half of the 2016-2017 academic year.

This study has been carried out in accordance with the pretest-posttest model and the experimental group has been applied the sports activity program 2 days and 2 hours per week during 8 weeks and control group has continued their education and training according to programs included in the curriculum. "Psychological Well-Being Scale" developed by Ryff (1989) and adapted to Turkish by Cenkseven (2004) has been used as data collection tool in this study. In the analysis of the data, independent group t test has been used for the intergroup comparisons and t test (Paired-Samples t test) has been used for the intra-group comparisons. The level of significance has been taken as 0.05 in the study.

As a result of the study, it has been determined that the individual development dimensions of the psychological well-being scale related with groups receiving (experimental) and not receiving the sports training (control) become different significantly in favor of the posttest score averages and also it has been understood that there is a difference in favor of the posttest score averages in the dimensions of environmental domination and self-determination but this difference is not significant at 0,05 level.