Participation In Sport Essay

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Many children and adolescents are given the opportunity to explore different sports growing up and are encouraged to become athletes. Sports provide physical exercise, which can be good for the mind, body, and spirit. Furthermore, team sports are good for learning accountability, dedication, and leadership; among many other positive traits (University of Missouri Health Care, n.d.). Participating in sport may also foster the development of sharing and helping others. Perhaps the role of an athlete plays a part in the development of prosocial behavior throughout the adolescent years. Prosocial behavior refers to "voluntary actions that are intended to help or benefit another individual or group of individuals" (Eisenberg, 1989). Studies have shown that prosocial behaviors include a broad range of activities such as sharing, comforting, rescuing, and helping. Not to be confused with altruism, prosocial behavior refers to an individual’s actions rather than the motivations behind those actions. Prosocial behavior refers to a pattern of activity, whereas, altruism is the motivation to help others out of pure regard for their needs rather than how the action will benefit oneself. Although behavior can be stemmed from such motivation, this study will focus on sport participation and its influence on prosocial behavior.
Purpose and Variables
Current research is limited because there are few exact scales or reliable instruments that measures prosocial tendencies in athletes, therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between sport participation (independent variable) and prosocial behavior (dependent variable).

Operational Definitions
Sport participation as defined in this study is the number of years an a...

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...ts of prosocial orientation, such as empathy and prosocial moral reasoning (Eisenberg, et al., 1991). The PPB includes 7 subscales that include: social responsibility, empathetic concern, perspective taking, personal distress, mutual moral reasoning, other oriented reason, and self-reported altruism. Scoring is completed for each individual subscale, which then factor into two sub-categories. Scales based off of empathy and helpfulness may then be compared. High scores on both scales represent prosocial tendencies.
Statistical Design
To assess the impact of sport participation on prosocial behavior an independent T-test will be used to compare to compare athletes versus non-athletes on the PABSS and PPB scales. To assess the efficiency of the PABSS a test re-test will be conducted to check for reliability and correlational statistics will provide further analysis.

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