12/12/07

RESULTS

What effects do motivation, self-talk, and social support have on the performance of collegiate athletes?

Welcome to my website!  My name is Ryan Hartman and I am a sophomore Exercise Science and Fitness Management major at the University of Dayton.  As a second year member of the UD Men's Soccer team, I am always in search of ways to continually improve my performance.  For this reason, I have elected to conduct a study that focuses on the motivation factors among collegiate athletes.  My interest in this study is based in trying to find the factors that motivate college athletes to compete and be successful at a high level of athletics.  I hope that you will take the time to contribute to my research.  The survey is taken anonymously and your responses will not be linked to you in any way.  If you would like to see your results, simply check this website again in early December as the results of the entire study will be posted at that time.  Thank you for your time and help!

Motivation can be defined as the direction of energy towards a certain task, and the amount of intensity applied in achieving that task.  There are many factors that contribute to the participation and success that an athlete has in his or her respected sport.  Amotivation is characterized by a lack of motivation towards something.  Extrinsic motivation can be described as the motivation to do well in order to achieve external rewards such as praise or money.  Intrinsic motivation is the type of motivation that comes from an inner desire to participate and compete in a case where the participant is granted self-pleasure simply due to playing.  Three crucial human needs of intrinsic motivation are competence, autonomy, and relatedness.  When we perceive our behaviors as effective to ourselves and to others, then we have achieved a level of competence.  Our achievement of autonomy is reflected by our ability to think and act according to our personal decisions.  Relatedness is crucial because it characterizes our perception of how connected we are to others.  To sum up these three aspects of intrinsic motivation: it is safe to say that if we can freely choose an activity that makes us happy, then we will ultimately be more motivated to work hard at that activity, leading us to greater success.

The purpose of this survey is to test numerous hypotheses of why athletes compete, involving extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation, social support, and self-talk.  This topic is important to me because as a collegiate athlete, I have first-hand experience at some of the things that motivate my teammates, and I want to see the factors that affect multiple groups of athletes in other sports as well. 

Disclaimer

       This survey has been placed online as part of an assignment for a computer applications class (HSS 226) at the University of Dayton.  Your participation in completing this survey is completely voluntary.  The survey is taken anonymously.  It is important that you respond to the survey items as truthfully as possible.  By completing this survey you will be contributing to my educational experience at UD.  The parts of this web page and survey that will contribute to my educational experience include the building of a website, creating a forms page, and subsequently working with the resulting response sets in a spreadsheet.  The survey questions you are about to answer have been taken from this source:

Grant, Stephanie.  2003.  "An Exploration of Motivation Among Collegiate Runners."  Department of Sociology and College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University.  101-107. <http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/send-pdf.cgi/Grant%20Stephanie.pdf?acc_num=ohiou1070397405>

       I feel that my use of these survey questions is covered by the "educational fair use" policy (http://www.libraries.psu.edu/mtss/fairuse/guidelines.html) .  Full credit for the ownership of the intellectual property contained within this survey is given to the authors of the survey questions.  I, the UD student, did not author any of the questions in the survey.  However, the original survey is structured so that it only pertains to college runners.  I altered the survey questions slightly so that the questions pertain to all college athletes, not just runners.  I also omitted some of the original survey questions as they either did not pertain to my topic or they were very similar to other survey questions.  The instructor did not author any of the survey questions.  The course instructor is Dr. C. Jayne Brahler and she can be contacted via e-mail at brahler@udayton.edu if you have any questions.

       Survey on the Motivation Factors of Athletes

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