INVESTIGATING THE RELATIONSHIP AMONG IMAGERY, MOTIVATION AND ANXIETY IN FEMALE ATHLETES FROM TEAM SPORTS

The aim of this research is to investigate the relationship among imagery, motivation and anxiety in female athletes from team sports. 69 female athletes living in Sakarya, aged 14-18, participated in the research. Sport Imagery Questionnaire (Hall et al., 1998; Kızıldağ, 2007), State Trait Anxiety Inventory (Spielberger et al., 1970; Öner and Le Compte, 1983) and Sport Motivation Scale (Pel letier et al., 1998; Kazak, 2004) were used for data collection. The data was analysed by descriptive statistics and Pearson’s Correlation analysis. Level of significance was determined to be 0.05. According to the results, sport experience significantly and positively correlated with motivational general mastery imagery and cognitive imagery (p 0.05). There was a significant relationship between intrinsic motivation and cognitive imagery (r=.369; p 0.05). A negative significant relationship was also found between amotivation and the length of sport experience (r=-.271, p 0.05). A statistically significant relationship was not obtained between motivation and anxiety (p 0.05). When the findings were examined, it was seen that scores for cognitive imagery and motivational general mastery imagery increases as the length of sport experience increases. It could also indicate that athletes with higher cognitive imagery scores could have higher intrinsic motivation scores. The negative relationship between sport experience and amotivation could be interpreted as that more experienced female athlete could have lower amotivation scores.