Exploring playfulness levels of young athletes doing individual and team sports

Abstract

The present research aimed to identify and compare playfulness levels of individuals aged 10-14 years engaging in individual and team sports. The sample consisted of 356 participants. We employed a correlational design and used the “Playfulness Scale for 10-14-years-old Children” developed by Hazar as the data collection tool. In data analysis, we utilized descriptive statistics, Independent Samples T-test, One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), and Tukey HSD and LSD tests for within-group comparisons. We computed the internal consistency coefficient of the scale to be .84. The results suggested that all participants showed high playfulness levels (97.26 ± 16.02) and got the highest scores on the “Social Adaptation” sub-scale (40.50 ± 6.67) while obtaining the lowest scores on the “Game Passion” sub-scale (21.02 ± 7.00). Overall, we determined that the participants significantly differed in playfulness by age and branch, but it was not the case by gender.

Keywords: Individual and team sports, playfulness, sedentary, awareness.

This article is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0