Investigation of physical activity and behavioral changes in special olympics unified soccer athletes

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this study was to examine the effects of 8 weeks SpecialOlympics Integrated Soccer Program on soccer skills, social competence andproblem behavior of children with and without mental retardation (MR). Participantswere 38 boys with mild MR (divided into two group 23 of them as a SpecialOlympics Athletes, mean age of 14.1±1.1 years; 15 of them as a control group, meanage of 14.51±0.81 years) and 38 boys without MR (divided into two group 23 ofthem as a Partner, mean age of 13.22±0.79 years; 15 of them as a control group,mean age of 13.78±0.49 years). Control groups were selected randomly in theparticipants whose characteristics similar to the experimental groups (age, genderand intelligence level). Before and after the program, Special Olympics Skill Test,Children Behavior Control List (CBCL, for children aged between 4 and 18 years)was administered to the participants. After the program, Special Olympics IntegratedSports (SOIS) Evaluation Form was administered to the Special Olympics Athletes(SOA), parents and trainers. According to the SOIS regulations, participant dividedinto four equal groups and 3 days a week, one and half hour soccer program wascarried out during 8 weeks. In statistical analyses One-way ANOVA was used todetect differences between groups in before and after program measurements. If thedifferences were found the Tukey?s HSD post hoc test was used to analyze directionand nature of differences between groups. The effects of soccer program wereanalyzed by using paired sample t-test for each group. Chi-square and Mc-Nemartests were used for determining differences in frequency.After soccer program, compared to the control group, there was aconsiderable improvement in soccer skills of partners and SOA. Social competencyscore of SOA group increased significantly in post-test, compared to the pre-testvalues. There was no significant change in social competency score of partners.When we examined pre and post-test values, there was a significant decrease inthought problem, internal tendency, anxiety, attention, social withdraw and totalproblem scores of SOA, but variation in problem behavior scores of partners wasinsignificant. While in pre-test SOA had 6 problem behaviors, which were in theclinic level, in pos-test they had only one problem behavior in clinic level. However,when we compared the groups with respect to differences between pre and post-testscore (subtraction of post-test score to pre-test score), there were no significantdifferences between groups in all problem behaviors (p>.05). According to results ofSOIS Evaluation Form, athletes, their parents and trainers reported positive opinionabout program.Key Words; Integration, Children with Mental Disability, Special Olympics,Maladaptive Behaviorv