Genderwise Investigation of Empahty Skills in Child Athletes

Year 2019, , 234 - 237, 15.09.2019

Yasin Arslan , Gülfem Sezen Balçıkanlı

https://doi.org/10.15314/tsed.586091

Abstract

ABSTRACT

This
study intends to investigate the empathy skills in child athletes with regard
to gender. The study group comprises 226 children selected randomly from
various clubs in Ankara. 56.7% of the total number is female and 40.3% is male.
When the sports age of the group with a mean age of 12.16 is examined, it can
be seen that 40.7% have been doing sports for 1-2 years, 42.0% have been doing
sports for 3-4 years and 17.3% have been doing sports for 5-6 years. The study
group is distributed into branches, with 29.2% pertaining to volleyball, 42% to
handball, and 28.8% to basketball. In the study, 'Empathy Scale for Children'
developed by Bryant (3) and adapted to Turkish by Yüksel (23) was used as data
collection tool. The frequency, percentage distributions and the mean values of
the sub-dimensions of the scales were calculated. Independent Samples T-test
was used to determine the empathy levels of the child athletes. When the
findings were examined, it was seen that the empathy levels of the child
athletes differed according to gender and this difference was statistically
significant in favor of girls (p=.00). As a result, the activities aiming to
improve the sportspeople’s taking roles and perspectives along with empathetic
thinking skills should be included in the process of creating empathetic people
thus empathetic sensitivity should be increased. 

Keywords

Children, Child athletes, Empathy, Gender, sports

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