The Effect of Sport on Life Skills in High School Students

Abstract

Sport has many psychological and social benefits beyond developing physical skills. It can be used to teach young people important life skills such as teamwork, goal setting, problem solving, decision making, leadership, time management, cognitive, emotional, communication and social skills. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the effect of sports on life skills in high school students. The sample of the study consists of 500 high schools students. Turkish version of the Life Skills Scale for Sports (LSSS) developed by Açak and Düz (2018) was used to data collection. The Mann Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis H tests were used for single and multiple comparisons. The level of significance was accepted as p<.05. 61% of the sample was boys and 39% of them was girls. There was significant mean score differences in the subscales of emotional and social skills according to gender variable; in the subscales of leadership and goal-setting according to age variable; in the subscales of leadership, goal setting, emotional and social skills according to type of school variable; in the subscales of time management, leadership, teamwork and goal setting according to club license variable; in the subscales of time management and goal-setting according to the sport-year variable; in the subscales of time management, leadership, emotional skills and goal setting according to the number of training variable. As a conclusion, it was observed that life skills improved through sport in high school students.