Self-esteem and mental toughness in athletes who interested in far eastern sports

This research aims to examine the mental toughness and self-esteem of the athletes who are interested in Far Eastern Sports in terms of various variables. The population of research consists of athletes who are actively interested in karate, judo and taekwondo sports in private and official sports halls in the provinces of Rize and Trabzon. The sampling consists of a total of 224 volunteer karate, judo and taekwondo athletes who participated in sport in these sports halls between 2018 and 2019. In the research; "Demographic Information Form" developed by the researcher with the expert opinion, and "Mental Toughness Inventory in Sports" were used for the athletes as data collection tools. Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was used to determine whether the obtained data showed normal distribution. The skewness and kurtosis coefficients were also taken into account as normality indicators of the data. The number of categories was taken into account when comparing the mental endurance and self-esteem scores and demographic characteristics of athletes who are interested in Far Eastern sports. In the analysis of the data, independent sample t-Test, one-way analysis of variance, multiple analysis of variance (MANOVA) and Pearson correlation analysis tests were used. Windows SPSS 26.0 statistics program was used in the analysis of the information. According to the findings obtained as a result of the analysis made in the study, no significant difference was found between the self-esteem and demographic characteristics of athletes who are interested in Far Eastern sports. But in Mental Toughness, there were significant differences found between athletes; "gender and control sub-dimension'', "competition category and confidence sub-dimension", "education status and persistence sub-dimension'', ''income status and persistence sub-dimension''. However, in Mental Toughness, there was no significant differences found between athletes; "orientation to sports and sports branch variables". There was found a positive and low significant difference between athletes; "years of playing sport and confidence sub-dimension in Mental Toughness". Besides there was found positively significance differences between athlete's self-esteem and mental toughness. It was observed that as the self-esteem of athletes increased, significant increases occurred in their mental toughness levels.