Research on self-esteem in decision making and decision-making styles in taekwondo athletes

The aim of the study is to examine the self-esteem in decision making and decision-making styles of taekwondo athletes who joined the Turkish Senior Taekwondo Championship in 2012. The population of the study consisted of 410 female and 628 male athletes, making a total of 1038 athletes. The study was conducted on 122 female ((X) over bar (age) = 20.25 +/- 3.39), 241 male athletes ((X) over bar (age) = 21.50 +/- 7.23), making a total of 363 athletes ((X) over bar = 21.07 +/- 6.21), sport experience, on average, of 7 years (M-year=7.62 +/- 3.78) who were selected randomly. The data collection tool was the Melbourne Decision Making Questionnaire I-II, developed by Mann et al. (1998) and adapted into Turkish by Deniz (2004). In the data analysis, descriptive statistics, frequency (n), percentage (%), mean ((X) over bar) and standard deviation (SD) were utilized. For detecting the differences, non-parametrical tests, Mann-Whitney U test and Kruskall Wallis test were used as normality assumptions according to gender, sportive success and type of coach. Significance level was taken as 0.05. According to the findings, self-esteem in decision-making scores of women were higher than men, meanwhile buck-passing, procrastination and hyper vigilance decision-making scores of men were higher than women. No significant difference was obtained according to sportive success and type of coach. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.