engleski

Personality traits and concepts of motivation for sport in prepubescent children

Understanding of relationship between concepts of motivation and personality traits in children can significantly contribute to the processes of selection and orientation into a particular sport and in decreasing the droping-out trends, which are usual in the age of puberty. Previous research confirmed the connectedness of extroversion, neuroticism, anxiety and motivation. However, in these studies no gender differences were investigated (Argyle et al., 1990 ; mc Lellan et al., 1993 ; Horga et al, 1983). Three motivation inventories were employed in the present study and applied to the 63 prepubertal girls and 74 prepubertal boys.These were: the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory by McAuley et al., 1989, (IMI) the Sport Orientation Questionnaire by Gill and Deeter, 1988, (SOQ) and Minor Sport Enjoyment Inventory by Wankel and Kreisel, 1985. (adapted by Horga, Štimac, 1999) (EI), and the Personality Structure Inventory, by Momirović et al., 1984. The latter was founded on the cybernetic model of personality and adapted for youngsters. It comprises six conative regulatory and control mechanisms: of defence reactions (ALPHA) – anxiety, of attack reactions (SIGMA) – aggresiveness, of organic functions (CHI) conversiveness, coordination of conative functions (DELTA) – dissociation, of integration of regulatory functions (ETA) - morality, and of activity level (epsilon) – extroversion/ introversion.The motivation factors, interpretation of which is presented in the third column of Table 1, were obtained by a means of factor analysis (promax transformation) of every inventory items, separately. Relationship between personality and concepts of motivation was determined by the correlation analysis (Table 1). A greater number of statistically significant correlations between between scales of personality and motivation was obtained in girls than in boys. Further, a greater number of correlations between aggresiveness (SIGMA) and activity (EPSILON), and factors of motivation obtained for girls, should be stressed here, as opposed to the sample of boys, where a significant positive correlation was obtained only for the EPSILON and one for the aggresivenss factor.Girls with enhanced aggresiveness are obviously more motivated in traditionally structured exercise programmes, whereas in boys motivation is independent of the level of aggresiveness. Due to the aforementioned finding it would be recommendable to design exercise programmes in a different way so as to satisfy needs of girls with the lower level of aggresiveness as well.

motivational concepts ; sport ; prepubertal children

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