Investigation of the relationship between motivation to participate in sports and psychological well-being of visually impaired athletes

Aim: This study aims to examine the relationship between visually impaired athletes' motivation to participate in sports and psychological well-being. Material and Method: This research was conducted according to the relational screening model, one of the quantitative research methods. The universe of the study consists of visually impaired athletes who actively participate in sports. The sample of the research consists of 359 athletes aged 18 and over, who were selected by the convenience sampling method, one of the non-random sampling methods. Demographic Information Form, Scale for Participation in Sports Motivation in Disabled Individuals and Psychological Well-being Scale were used as data collection tools. Normality tests of the data were evaluated according to kurtosis-skewness values with the Kolmogorov Smirnov test. In non-normally distributed data, Mann Whitney U test was used for comparing two categories, and Kruskal-Wallis H test was used for comparing three or more categories. Result: Based on the findings, a statistically significant difference was found in the gender, educastion level, duration of disability, frequency of doing sports per week and total sports experience variables of visually impaired atlhletes (p<0.05). In addition, according to the research findings, there is a statically significant, positive and moderate corrrelation between the motivation of visually impaired individuals to participate in sports and their psychological well-being levels (r = 0.40). Conclusion: İt has been found that visually impaired athletes feel better psychologically as their motivation to engage in sports increases.