Psycho-Social Adjustment of Female Athletes in Team and Individual Sports

This study was designed to compare the psycho-social adjustment of female athletes in team and individual sports. For this objective, the scores of sub-scales of psychosocial adjustment (namely competition, cooperation, agreement, escape, and conservation tendencies) were compared. The sample consisted of 122 female elite athletes (21 ± 7 years) from 3 different teams and 3 different individual sports. They were selected on the basis of random cluster sampling. Data were collected using psycho-social adjustment questionnaire (Thomas, 1998) which was used for the first time in Iran. The obtained internal consistency of the questionnaire stood at 0.89. The questionnaire consists of 30 dichotomous (two-choice) questions, measuring five different tendencies for psycho-social adjustment. To address the hypotheses, statistical comparisons were done using independent t-student and Hotling's t-square tests. Results demonstrated that psycho-social adjustment subscales of individual sport athletes (ISA) and team sports athletes (TSA) were not significantly different (p>0.05). However, the comparison of within-groupsubscales showed that TSA were different from ISA (0.05). TSA demonstrated a tendency to use conservation the most, whilst ISA to use agreement the most. Nevertheless, both TSA and ISA athletes showed the least tendency to use competition. On the whole, it is concluded that TSA and ISA could not be distinguished based on their psycho-social adjustment tendencies. Both individual and team sports facilitate the psycho-social adjustment of athletes.