A Scrutiny on the Moral Decision-Making Attitudes of the Youth Sportspeople in Combat Branches

Abstract

The objective of this study is to scrutinize the changes in the moral decision-making attitudes of the youth sportspeople in the branches of box, wrestling, karate, kickboxing, judo, and taekwondo. The population of the study is constituted by the youth sportspeople in Turkey and the sample group consists of 257 male and 135 female, totally 392, sportspeople doing sports in the youth setups of box, wrestling, karate, kickboxing, judo, and taekwondo in the province of Osmaniye. In acquiring the data, for demographic properties, a personal information form and, for moral decision-making attitudes, “Moral Decision-making Attitudes Scale in Youth Sports” developed by Lee, Whitehead, and Ntoumanis (2007) and adapted to the Turkish culture and examined its test reliability by Gürpınar (2014a) were used. In our study where the level of significance was determined as 0,05, homogeneousness and variances of the data were determined by conducting a descriptive statistics operation; Kruskal Wallis, Man Whitney U tests were used in determining the changes between groups; and Tamhane’s T2 test was utilized to determine the source of the difference. In our study, no change in the moral decision-making attitudes of the youth sportspeople in combat branches in line with the factor of period of doing sports was observed, while it was determined that the factors of age, gender, branch, and parental education level are effective in the moral decision-making attitudes of sportspeople and that such effects cause statistically significant alterations (p<0. 05).