Self esteem in adolescents who do sport and who do not

ABSTRACTSelf Esteem in Adolescents Who Do Sport and Who Do NotEbru GÜNThe aim of this study is to introduce the correlation between the practice of doingsport and the self esteem in adolescents of 12-14 years of age who do sport and whodo not. As a subproblem, the psychosomatic signs of the adolescents of same agegroup with and without the practice of sport were studied. Also, as the socio-demographic properties, the socio-economical level of the adolescents was studied.In this study, which was conducted towards the adolescents of 12-14 years of agewho either do or do not do sport and who live in Diyarbakır and Ankara, therelation of this property with self esteem and psychosomatic signs was studied. Inaddition, the scores of self esteem and of psychosomatic signs were comparedaccording to the cities. In this study, the Psychosomatic Signs Scale and the SelfEsteem Scale, which is a subscale of Rosenberg Self Esteem Scale, introduced byMorris Rosenberg, was employed in order to determine the self esteem andpsychosomatic signs of 197 adolescents who do sport and of 236 who do not. APersonal Information Form prepared by the researcher was used in order todetermine the socio-demographic properties. The package software SPSS 10.00was used for analyzing the data and the correlations. Statistically significantdifference was found between the self esteem scores of those who do sport and ofthose who do not. Otherwise, significant inverse correlations were found betweenthe psychosomatic scores of those who do sport and of those who do not. Positivesignificant correlations were found between the self esteem and the adolescents?socio-economical level. Negative significant correlation was found between thesocio-economical level and the psychosomatic signs of the adolescents. Also, nosignificant difference was found when the self esteem and psychosomatic signswere compared according to the cities. At the end of this study, it is shown thatsport is highly important and helpful especially in reducing the signs of stress inadolescents.Key words: Adolescence, Self Esteem, Sport