Evaluation of return to sports and anxiety status of TEAM athletes WHO had anteri̇or cruciate ligament injury: A mixed methods research

The aim of this study is to evaluate the return to sports and anxiety status of athletes who have had anterior cruciate ligament injury. Explanatory sequential mixed design, one of the mixed research methods, was used in the research. 185 Athletes (87 women 98 men) who had anterior cruciate ligament injuries were included in the study. The average age of the athletes is 27.04. As a quantitative data collection tool in the research, the sports injury anxiety scale developed by Rex and Metzler (2016) and adapted into Turkish by Caz et al., (2019), and the scale of returning to sports after anterior cruciate ligament injury developed by Webster et al., (2008) and adapted into Turkish by Harput et al., (2017) was used. As a result of the parametric tests (Independent Sample T-Test, One-Way Anova Test, Manova) performed with the IBM SPSS Statistics 26 program and the JASP 2021 program, it was found that there were significant differences in terms of returning to sports and anxiety status of team athletes who had anterior cruciate ligament injury. Semi-structured interviews were conducted as a qualitative data collection tool in the research. When the qualitative and quantitative data obtained from the research were evaluated together, it was found that the psychological state of the injured athletes is important in the return to sports. It can be stated that athletes should be evaluated psychologically. It has been concluded that the anxiety states of the athletes affect the process of returning to sports.