Effect of High-School ATHLETIC Majors' Self-Leadership and Self-Efficacy on Exercise Adherence Intention

Abstract

Korea rose to the status of sports powerhouse in the world arena as it ranked high place in 88 Seoul Olympic Games and has since remained as elite in sports within 10th place. Elite school sports policy has worked as an important foundation for Korea to have become a sports giant. Especially, Special Athletic Talent System which began as athletic talent education from 1971 has discovered talented student athletes in early age, developed their talents and help athletes to exercise them. Especially, when excessive stress is placed on young athletes, they not only lose sense of satisfaction and interest but, in extreme cases, they also reach the stage of abandoning their future as athletes due to negative thinking. Recently, with growing interest in social and psychological factors related to athletes' performance, various studies have reported their results. While interest in and concern for student athletes' exercise adherence intention has been rising, leaders raising them tend to be interested only in enhancing their performance while neglecting their duty to establish system to provide the athletes with psychological stability to continue their athletic career. Preceding studies have found that, in order for students to consistently maintain athletic career path, self-leadership, which enhances confidence and performance by exercising influence on athletes themselves and helping them to achieve their goals, and self-efficacy, which enables the athletes to be aware of their high competency and expect corresponding behaviors and results, are vital. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to verify the causal relationship among high-school athletic majors' exercise adherence intention and their self-leadership and self-efficacy and, through this, provide basic material for studies to boost exercise adherence intention. The subjects of this study were 410 students of athletic high school selected through convenience sampling. Students were led to respond to the questionnaires in self-administration method and answered questionnaires were collected on the spot. Data were analyzed by using SPSS 20 and Amos 20. Validity and reliability of the measurement tools were verified through confirmatory factor analysis and reliability analysis. In order to examine subjects' demographic characteristics, technical statistics were conducted and, in order to find out correlation among variables, correlation analysis was conducted. To verify goodness-of-fit of study model and causal relationship among variables, structural equation model was used. In order to verify validity of test, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted and for reliability analysis, Cronbach’s α coefficient was calculated. Excluding items with low SMC (Squared Multiple Correlations) for each factor, TLI value was .903~.927, CFI value was .909~.930 and RMSEA value was .067~.070, confirming the goodness-of-fit of the model. As the result of reliability analysis, value of Cronbach’s α was .761~.826, securing reliability.