Goal Orientation and Motivational Climate in University Student-Athletes

Abstract

The aim of the study was to investigate the goal orientation and the motivational climate of university student-athletes and to reveal the relationship between the goal orientation and the motivational climate. The sample of the research consists of 212 student-athletes studying at universities. TEOSQ (Duda, 1989a;1992; Duda and Nicholls, 1992) and PMCSQ (Walling et al., 1993) were used as data collection tools. The results indicated that university student-athletes were task orientated and perceived the motivational climate as mastery climate. Besides, performance climate predicted ego orientation and mastery climate predicted task orientation. Moreover, age and career were negatively related to goal orientation and motivational climate. The results of the research contribute to a better understanding of the motivational process in physical education and sports environments by suggesting some implications both to the practitioners (teachers and coaches) who work in the field and to the researchers who are doing theoretical and empirical studies.