Expectations and attitudes of parents towards participation of their children into physical education classes

Objective of this study is to determine the expectations and attitudes of parents of students in the 6th, 7th and 8th grades in primary school towards participation of their children into physical education classes and to display, in a comparative way, whether these attitudes and expectations acquire a different character according to the independent variables obtained through personal information of students and parents. Parents of 955 students attending to the schools affiliated to the Provincial Directorate of National Education in Mersin Province participated into the study voluntarily. ?Attitude Scale?, ?Expectation Questionnaire? and ?Open-Ended Questionnaire? concerning the attitudes of parents towards participation of their children into physical education classes were used in the study as the data-collection tools. It has been observed in the outcome of the study that attitudes of parents towards participation of their children into physical education classes vary depending on the grade of their children, sex of the teacher of physical education class of their children, children?s state of doing sports/playing in the school teams and sports clubs, parents? state of doing sports, parents? watching TV programs concerning sports, reading articles concerning sports (newspapers, magazines, books and etc?) and frequency of watching sports contests and competitions. It has also been found out in the study that reactions given to the expressions in the expectation questionnaire are usually in the desired way and significant differences were detected for some variables. Furthermore, it has been figured out that findings acquired through the content analysis have similar characteristics with other findings obtained through the study. Keywords: Participation into physical education and sports, parents, attitudes.