Comparing Perceived Physical Competence and Fear of Failure Between Sports Participators and Non-Participators

Physically active children present better mental health. Moreover, compared to inactive children, they are less exposed to mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety. Sports participation is among the main approaches to maintain biopsychological health. Motivation is among the most effective characteristics respecting participating or non–participating in sports. Furthermore, competence perception essentially impacts motivation. Another factor influencing motivation to participate in sports is the fear of failure. The role of fear of failure and perceived physical competence in non–participating adolescents in sports remains undiscovered. Thus, this study aimed to compare perceived physical competence and fear of failure between adolescents who participate and do not participate in sports.

This was an applied and descriptive–comparative (concerning data collection) investigation. The statistical population consisted of first high school students in Urmia City, Iran, in the academic year of 2018–2019. The study sample consisted of 193 high school students in the age range of 13–15 years who were randomly selected using the multistage cluster sampling method. Initially, among the first high schools, 8 schools (4 girls’ schools & 4 boys’ schools) and 3 classes per school (N=420) were randomly selected. The researcher distributed the questionnaires to the explored students by attending the classes and provided explanations; then, they completed the questionnaires. After reviewing the questionnaires, 193 subjects were eligible to participate in the study (with or without sports participation). The researcher–made questionnaire, the Performance Failure Appraisal Inventory (Conroy et al., 2002), and the Physical Self–Description Questionnaire (Marsh et al., 1994) were used to collect the necessary data. The research data were analyzed by descriptive statistics (including mean, standard deviation, frequency, & percentage), and inferential statistics, by Independent Samples t–test, Chi–squared test, and Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA), in SPSS. The significance level of the tests was considered 0.05.

The obtained results suggested that perceived physical competence (p<0.001) and fear of failure (p<0.001) were significantly different between the study groups. According to the Eta–squared (0.41) for fear of failure, this characteristic accounted for 41% of sports participation. Additionally, Eta–squared was obtained as 0.32 for perceived physical competence, reflecting that perceived physical competence accounted for 32% of sports participation.

Based on the current research results, compared to the examined adolescents who participated in sports, their non–participating counterparts presented less perceived physical competence and greater fear of failure. These findings supported the theory of competency perception.