Making sport of middle school students according to the status of the investigation of the level of social skills

The aim of this study is to research the social skill levels of middle school students (6., 7. and 8. grades) who does sports and who does not. This study includes 639 students some of which are volunteers to participate and some of which are chosen randomly by appropriate sampling method from middle school students in Kütahya at the 2016-2017 education year. Personal information form which was prepared by the investigator and "Social Skills Assessment Scale in Children" developed in 1983 by Matson, Rotatory and Hessel and was adapted to Turkish in 2003 by Bacanlı and Erdoğan were used as data collecting toools. Percentage (%) and frequency methods were used to determine the distribution of participants' personal information; Kolmogorov-Smirnov normality test was applied to determine whether the data has normal distribution or not and it is found that the data suports non-parametric structure. To search whether there is an important difference between the participants' social skill levels related to the sub dimensions of "Social Skills Assessment Scale in Children", Kruskall-Wallis test was applied at the α= 0.05 level of significance according to their universities and departments, and finally Mann-Whitney U and Kruskall Wallis tests were aplied to determine the significant differences. According to the results of the analysis, while there was not a significant diference between the social skill levels and the variables of doing sports by license, sports faclities at schools, education level of the mother and income level of the family (p>0.05), a significant difference emerged between the social skill levels of the students and the gender differences of them. On the other hand, a significant difference emerged between the social skill levels and the variables of father's education level and the duration of doing sports at the sub dimension of "Positive Social Behaviour", and a significant difference emerged between the social skill levels of the students and their class level variable at the sub dimension of "Negative Social Behaviour" (p<0.05). As a result, it is emerging that lots of variables at their social skill levels effect the sub dimension of positive social behaviour, the sub dimension of negative social behaviour and the social skill level directly. On the other hand it is seen that some of the variables given to the students does not effect social behaviours.