Examination of self-esteem and gender perception levels of sportswomen engaged in combat sports

The aim of this study was to examine the self-esteem and gender perception levels of female athletes who do martial arts. The research was applied to 305 female sportswomen who do martial arts in Ankara province in the years of 2020-2021. "The "Rosenberg Self- Esteem Scale" (RBE)" which is the first subscale of Rosenberg's scale among 12 subscales, will be used to determine the levels of self-esteem. The Turkish adaptation of the 4-point Likert-type and 10-item scale was made by Çuhadaroğlu (1986). The "Gender Perception Scale" consisting of a total of 25 items, including 5 likert types, 10 positive and 15 negative items, developed by Altınova and Duyan (2013) in order to evaluate individuals' perceptions of gender, and the "Personal Information Form" created by the researcher was used. Since the kurtosis and skewness values were in the range of ±2, it was observed that the variables showed normal distribution and parametric statistics were used in the analysis. The independent samples t-test was made when comparing the dependent variables according to the variables in which the independent variable has 2 groups; whereas one-way analysis (ANOVA) of variance was made when comparing the dependent variables according to the variables in which the independent variable had 3 or more groups. The source of the difference was put forward through the Tukey multiple comparison test, which is one of the post-hoc tests, in the variables with significant difference following the one-way analysis of variance. However, Pearson correlation analysis was used to examine the relationship between variables. The analyzes were made with the SPSS 22 package program and the level of significance was determined as α=0.05. According to the research findings; there was a significant difference in self-esteem levels in favour of those who are married, those who do sports 3-4 days a week, those who have other family members doing sports, national athletes, athletes in the judo branch, athletes with an average monthly income of 3001-5000 TL, and athletes with undergraduate and graduate education levels. Considering the gender levels; a significant difference was found in favour of singles, those who do not have any other family members doing sports, those who only drink alcohol, those who are not national athletes, athletes in wing chun, taekwondo and kick-boxing branches. Furthermore, a positive significant relationship was found between the age of the athletes and the years of experience in martial arts (r=0.67, p<0.01) and self-esteem (r=0.38, p<0.01). A positive significant difference was found between the years of experience in martial arts and the levels of self-esteem (r=0.33, p<0.01). However, no significant relationship was found between gender roles and age (r=-0.07, p>0.05), years of experience in combat sports (r=- 0.11, p>0.05) and self-esteem (r=-0.04, p>0.05).