A study of achievement motivation self efficacy task and ego orientation of university level swimmers

Abstract

Research has shown that psychological factors, such as emotion regulation, goalsetting, awareness, focus, self-efficacy, mental training, and motivation affect sports performance. Therefore, there has been an increased interest in the last few decades towards studying the effects of these various factors. However, in the Indian sports psychology context, a comprehensive study of the effects of achievement motivation, self-efficacy and goal-orientations on the performance of university level swimmers is lacking. This study is intended to close this research gap. The main aim of this research was to examine the levels of achievement motivation, selfefficacy, task and ego-orientation of university level swimmers. Others objectives were to study the relationship of these factors and to compare the swimming performance of medalist and non-medalist swimmers. A total of 140 university swimmers were purposefully selected and divided into two groups to compare these levels. The data were collected using standardized tools during the All-India InterUniversity swimming and Waterpolo competitions held at Jain University Bangalore. The data were analyzed by conducting descriptive and inferential statistics tests (t-tests and correlation) using the SPSS software. The findings of the study revealed higher levels of achievement motivation, self-efficacy and taskorientation of medalist swimmers than the non-medalist counterparts. The egoorientation part of the goal orientation was found to be similar for the two groups. Some surprising, but interesting, results were also obtained, such as, a negative correlation between self-efficacy and task-orientation among medalist swimmers and a positive correlation between task and ego orientation of non-medalist swimmers. newline