The impact of psychological resilience levels of handball players in professional leagues on mental toughness and anxiety states

In this study, which was conducted to examine the relationship between Psychological Resilience, Mental Endurance and Anxiety Status of Handball Players in Elite Leagues, the data were delivered to the participants through Google forms and volunteerism was taken as basis. A total of 387 people were reached and 21 questionnaire forms with deficiencies or errors were excluded from the analysis and 366 questionnaire forms were taken into consideration for analysis. The data collection tool consists of the Brief Psychological Resilience Scale (BSRS) adapted into Turkish by Doğan (2015), the Sports Anxiety Scale developed by Smith et al. (1986) and adapted into Turkish by Akyol et al. (2016), the Mental Endurance Inventory in Sport developed by Sheard, Golby and Van Wersch (2009) and adapted into Turkish by Altınbaş (2015), and a personal information form. The data were analysed according to the information obtained from the participants using SPSS 25.0 package programme with a 95% confidence interval. Descriptive statistics and frequency distributions were calculated for the personal information of the participants. Outlier values in the data set were examined with the help of Mahalanobis distance values and outlier values were removed from the analysis. Since the significance level was less than p<0.05 according to the Kolmogorov-Smirnova test, it was decided that the data did not have a normal distribution and nonparametric tests should be applied for the analysis. Mann Witney U test was used for binary variables and Kruskal Wallis H test was used for more than two variables. In addition, the relationship between the participants' moods and exercise addiction was determined by Spearman correlation analysis. It is concluded that there is a statistically significant difference between the participants' psychological resilience and only the Variable of Frequency of Playing Sports, there is a statistically significant difference between their Anxiety Status and the variables of gender, age, league category, sports history, handball history and Frequency of Playing Sports, and there is a statistically significant difference between their Mental Resilience and the variables of gender, age, sports history, handball history and Frequency of Playing Sports. As a result, it was concluded that there is a significant negative moderate relationship between psychological resilience and anxiety levels of handball players, there is no significant relationship between psychological resilience and mental toughness of handball players, and there is a significant negative moderate relationship between mental toughness and anxiety levels.