Document Type
Dissertation
First Faculty Advisor
Weinberger, Nanci
Keywords
children; sports; development; competitiveness; cooperativeness
Publisher
Bryant University
Abstract
The topic which I have chosen for my senior capstone project is in the psychology field and involves children’s personalities, in particular the level of cooperativeness and competitiveness, and their sports preferences. The literature research covered the child’s skill level, mainly motor skills which the children possess, competitive and cooperative sports categories as well as family influence, each which have an effect on this study. The five hypotheses which are being examined are: competitive children will prefer the competitive sports over the cooperative ones, cooperative children will prefer cooperative sports, level of competitiveness and cooperativeness will have an effect on their favorite sports choice, skill level will be positively associated with enjoyment level, and child’s enjoyment level will have an effect on their sports participation. In order to examine the relationship between early competitive and cooperative style and the choice of sports that children will make, kindergarten aged children who have not participated in organized team sports yet will be studied. I will conduct a sports day with the purpose being to assess children’s competitive and cooperative style. After the sports day, the students themselves will have the opportunity to reflect on what they liked best; this will obtain the data of the child’s future sports choice. The personality portion of this research study will be obtained through surveys passed out to both the teacher and the parents. These surveys will ask questions about different aspects of the children’s behavior and their levels of competitiveness versus cooperativeness. For the results, the first and fourth hypotheses were upheld, while the second, third and fifth had some support.
