Social support intervention program for youth women team players its effect on social and task cohesion

Social support is defined as the resources provided by others, the quality of social relationships such as perceived help and actual support received (Cohen, 1985; Schwarzer and Leppin, 1991). Commitment is defined as "the total force field that enables members to remain in a group" (Festinger et al., 1950, p. 164). According to the 'Multidimensional Model of Team Cohesion' proposed by Carron et al. (1985) in the context of sports; each team member develops perceptions about other members in the team and the team as a whole. These are the individual attractiveness of the team, which reflects the individual's individual perceptions of staying in the team, and the individual perceptions of closeness and cohesion in the team as a whole, and the perception of team cohesion, which reflects the degree to which the team remains together. With the effect of social support, communication between athletes can be strengthened, unity skills can be increased, and their ability to adapt to new situations they encounter as a team can develop. In this sense, the use of social support in team sports can facilitate the process of becoming a team, providing athletes with emotional and social development and a successful season (Rosenfeld and Richman, 2008). Based on the findings mentioned above, this research aims to reveal how task and social cohesion will change as a result of the application of the social support intervention program developed by Rosenfeld and Richman (1997) to young team players. The 2 x 3 repeated measures mixed factorial design study was conducted with a total of 43 players, consisting of six teams consisting of young girls aged 12-18, residing in Ankara and affiliated with the Turkish Volleyball Federation. The athletes assigned to the experimental group were applied an 8-week social support intervention program in the middle of the season. It was assumed that the social support and the team (social and task) cohesion of the experimental group that received the intervention program would be significantly higher than the control group that did not receive the intervention. IBM SPSS 22.0 software was used to analyze the obtained data. Descriptive statistics were used in the analysis of the data. Repeated Measures One-Way Analysis of Variance was used to determine the change that occurred over time in the experimental group and to examine the difference between the control group. The findings showed that the social support, social and task cohesion scores decreased over time in both the experimental and control groups. The expected significant difference was not observed between the experimental and control groups over time.