ANALYSIS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS AND DECISION MAKING IN A GROUP OF SWIMMERSCLASS

Abstract

Lorena Maldonado, Ignacio Martín-Tamayo y Luis Javier Chirosa

This research aims to analyze the psychological characteristics related to the athletic performance and decision-making style of 70 swimmers, relating them to gender, sporting level and sport category. We have used the questionnaire Psychological Skills Related to Sport Performance (C.P.R.D, according with its Spanish name) with five sales: stress management, the influence of performance evaluation, motivation, mental ability and team cohesion (Gimeno, 1999) and the Decision Making Style Questionnaire (CETD, in Spanish) with three sub-scales: perceived competence in decision-making, the anxiety and burden felt when deciding and the commitment to learn decision-making (Ruiz et al., 2000) so that our research design has had a co-relational nature. The results show that the two questionnaires are suitable for measuring the psychological characteristics of performance and decision-making in sport. Noteworthy was the absence of significant gender differences, both psychological characteristics and decision making. Analyzing the sport category there were significant differences in team cohesion scale (p = .001). This as the category increases the score averages decreases. In the sporting level no significant difference were found neither the Psychological characteristics nor in decision-making. Finally we can say that we found several significant linear relationships between each questionnaire subscales and between the subscales of both.