The personality structure of elite artistic gymnasts

ABSTRACTThe Personality Structure of Elite Artistic GymnastsGüler, MergülMS, Education of TrainingAdvisor: Prof. Dr. Gül TİRYAKİ SÖNMEZOctober 2005The concept of personality has been one of the main studying area ofpsychology.Personality is one of the rings of human relations both in society and inits own envoirment.Everyone who has appropriate pysiologica capacity and who improvesthis capacity in appropriate way can be a very good sportsman, butunfortunately every successful sportsman can?t be a very good competitor.This explanation explains the great importance of the psychological proccess.The aim of this research was to search the features the personalities ofthe gymnasts. It is thought that the findings which have been obtained as aresult of this study will help to train more soccessful gymnasts and improvingtraining programs.The subjects of this research were the athletes (N=100) who are fromİstanbul, Ankara, İzmir and Bolu cities. The population and sample of thestudy are formed by the same athletes.The instrument of the study was 16 PF (The Sexteen PersonalityQuestionnaire) Personality Inventory which developed by Cattel Reymond.Questionnaire was applied to athletes at the camps of national team andcompetitions by the researcher.In order to analyze the data, t-test for Equality of Means and Levene?stest have been used.Consequently, it has been seen that males, interested in gymnasticshave more realistic personalities at reaching their target than females. Also,male gymnasts give more importance to their work, but females don?t takecare to their work. Further males are more pratical, dependent to traditions,however females focus on new things that aren?t tried before and try to applytheir own projects.ıııIn sum, it can be said that both females and males don?t work enough,don?t give importance to their responsibilities, aren?t resistant to stresses, arenervous and impatient, can?t control their feelings easily and are inclined toclumsiness.The result of the t-test for Equality of Means showed that there is astatistical significance difference between male and female gymnasts on bothC and M personality factors (p<0.05).On the other hand, there is no statistical significant difference on Q3and Q4 personality factors (p>0.05).Key Words: Gymnastics, Personality, Factorıv