Investigation of the relationship between university students recreation awareness and higher education life satisfaction levels

The objective of this study is to examine the levels of recreation awareness and life satisfaction of university students in higher education with respect to various variables, and to test the relationship between the two variables. The research focus group consists of students from the Faculty of Sports Sciences at Bartın University and the Faculty of Sports Sciences at Gazi University in the 2021-2022 academic year using convenience sampling method. In this context, the research sample group is comprised of 978 students from the Faculty of Sports Sciences in the 2021-2022 academic year. As the data collection tools of the research, the "Personal Information Form" prepared by the researcher to define the demographic information of the participants, the "Recreation Awareness Scale" to determine the recreation awareness levels, and the "Higher Education Life Satisfaction Scale" to assess the higher education life satisfaction levels have been used. The data obtained have been coded and transferred to the SPSS 25 package program, the percentage frequency distributions have been examined in order to identify descriptive statistics, and T-Test, The Mann Whitney U test, ANOVA, The Kruskal Wallis test and The Spearman's Rank Correlation analysis have been used. As a result of the analyses carried out, it has been observed that there is a significant difference in the recreational awareness and higher education life satisfaction scores of university students based on a variety of demographic variables. According to the Spearman correlation test applied between the scales, a positive and significant relationship has been found between higher education life satisfaction and pleasure-entertainment sub-dimension, social-attainment sub-dimension, self-development sub-dimension and recreation awareness total scores. Within this context, it has been noted that as the recreational awareness level of the participants increased, the level of higher education life satisfaction increased as well. This situation sustains the conceptual relation between the two concepts.