A Comparison of Perceived Social Anxiety among Individual and Team Sports Participant High School Students

Abstract

This paper aimed to investigate individual or team sports participant high school students’ perceived social anxiety
levels according to their sports branch, the weekly duration/day of doing sports, the aim for doing sports and gender.
Two hundred high school students (Mage=16.29 ± 1.11) participated in the study. The study designed as a
cross-sectional study and the Turkish version of Social Anxiety for Adolescents (SAS-A) used as the data gathering
tool. In the evaluation of data independent samples t-test and one-way ANOVA statistical methods used as the
hypothesis tests. According to the study findings, there was not any significant difference in the variable social
anxiety according to the sports branch and the weekly duration/day of doing sports. However, significant differences
were found between individual sports participants’ social anxiety according to aim for doing sports and gender. As a
result, this paper showed that professional individual sports participants had higher perceived social avoidance and
distress for general and new situations. Also, male individual sports participants reported a higher fear of negative
evaluation than females.