Personality Characteristics Of High School Female Athletes In Team And Individual Sports

Author : Laura Ann Benton
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 120 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (268 download)

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Download or read book The Agentic and Communal Motives of Boys and Girls Participating in High School Team Sports: Implications for Adolescent Personality Development written by Laura Ann Benton and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study investigates the self-concept of adolescents participating in high school athletics. Traditionally, sports participation has been conceptualized as a socializing agent for males. Competitive athletics has been one arena in which males learn acceptable masculine behavior. However, this study views participation on high school athletic teams as an appropriate and healthy socializing arena for not only males but also females. Based on the developmental literature of Gilligan and others, it was hypothesized that team sports provide a unique setting in which adolescents foster not only competitiveness, aggressiveness, and autonomy, but also cooperation, affiliation, and nurturance. Thus, the adolescent's self-concept is based on the combination of attributes traditionally viewed as masculine and feminine. The integration of these characteristics would decrease the need to disavow or deny parts of the self that are traditionally not supported or valued by the cultural milieu. Based on these assumptions, it was hypothesized that: (1) males and female athletes would score similarly on measures of aggression, autonomy, achievement, dominance, affiliation, sentience, and succorance, (2) female athletes and female non-athletes would score similarly on measures of nurturance, affiliation, sentience, and succorance, (3) female athletes would score higher than female non-athletes on measures of aggression, autonomy, achievement, and dominance, (4) female non-athletes would score higher than the male groups on measures of nurturance, affiliation, sentience, and succorance and lower than males on measures of aggression, autonomy, achievement, and dominance. In order to investigate this issue, the Personality Research Form - E (PRF-E) was administered to a sample of 33 male and female high school athletes and non-athletes. Eight of the PRF-E scales were chosen to investigate the self-concept of the adolescents based on their relationship to gender stereotyped personality characteristics. These scales were combined to form the dependent variable labelled as the "agentic" and "communal" motivations. The communal measure was calculated by adding each student's scores on the succorance, nurturance, affiliation, and sentience subtests. The agentic measure was calculated by adding each student's scores on the dominance, aggression, autonomy, and competitive subtests. A series of Kruskal-Wallis One Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) tests revealed that sports participation may not contribute to the development of agentic and communal motivations in male and female adolescents. Important limitations and implications of the research are also discussed such as the small sample size and refusal rate as well as future research goals such as replication and extension of this project.