Investigation of the master thesis conducted in the field of physical education and sport from 2004 to 2014 in Turkey

This study aimed to investigate the master thesis conducted in the field of physical education and sport for some certain variables from 2004 to 2014 in Turkey. We conducted searches in the Higher Education Authority Electronic Theses Archive among master theses on physical education and sports using specific keywords. The sampling of the research consists of 272 master theses approved and published between 2004 and 2014. A thesis tracking form, developed by the author, was used to study the theses to find out distribution by universities, institutes and years, gender of the authors, titles of the advisors, research subjects, types of research, patterns and sampling (work) groups, data collection tools, statistics methods used in the analysis of data and scope of local and foreign bibliography for master theses on "physical education and sports". We used a scanning model and document examination as a qualitative data collection tool. The data so obtained were analysed by means of statistics software programs. The findings reveal that a majority of the authors of the theses were male and that a majority of the titles of the advisors was assistant professor. The most frequent subject of thesis is physical education teaching programs, attitudes to and opinions about physical education and sports and academic achievement. We observed that the theses had used quantitative survey as type of research and descriptive (scanning) pattern as research pattern. As for sampling, we found out that primary and middle school students and teachers had been used more often. In addition, we observed that the authors tended to prefer surveys (questionnaires) as a data collection tool and parametric tests in statistical analyses used to analyse the data. We concluded that the scope of the local and foreign bibliography used in theses was not sufficient. Keywords: Physical education, sport, physical education teaching, physical education and sports