|
Page 2 of 3
METHODS
The questionnaire consisted of a 28-item adapted version of the PMQ (Gill et al., 1983) with additional demographic questions relating to grade, club location, primary martial art practices, gender, age, height, weight, experience, length of club membership, hours of training per week and number of males and females in the club all of which have been suggested as important factors in participation in sport. Also included were 8 questions that investigated the perceived importance of a number of factors previously identified as aspects of martial arts and physical activity participation such as tradition, progression through grades, learning self defence skills, technical ability of instructors, cost of participating, development of confidence, underpinning philosophy and instructional style.
Three hundred questionnaires were sent by post to 30 martial arts clubs in the West Midlands region of England. Club members were asked to complete the questionnaires and return them in the pre-paid envelope provided. The PMQ and perceived importance statements were structured in a 5-point Likert scale using the common prefixes of 'I participate because I …' and 'how important are the following to you…' respectively. Responses were identified as 'very important', 'important', 'somewhat important', 'unimportant' and 'not at all important'.
Due to the variable factor structure of the PMQ identified in previous research, principal component analysis (PCA) was performed to identify the factors evident in this sample. Items and factors were selected by the criteria of factor loadings above 0.40 and eigenvalues above 1.0 according to Ntoumanis, 2001.
RESULTS
 Seventy-five questionnaires were returned (return rate of 25%) from a total of 11 clubs from across the West Midlands representing practitioners in Tai Chi, Karate, Kung fu, Aikido, Jeet Kune Do, British Free Fighting, Taekwon-Do and Jujitsu. The belt grades of the respondents were varied ranging from white belt to 6th dan black belt. Only 29 of the respondents, however, entered their current belt grade status and therefore meaningful investigation of belt grade differences was inappropriate with the small numbers in each category. Whilst acknowledging the impact of the small sample size on the appropriateness of the use of the PCA procedure, seven factors were identified (explaining 68% of the variance) as 1- Affiliation; 2-Friendship; 3-Fitness; 4-Reward/status; 5-Competition; 6-Situational and 7-Skill development and their associated Eigenvalues, variance and Cronbach's alpha (α) can be seen in Table 3.
Gender, experience in martial arts (quartiles) and weekly training hours (quartiles) differences in the seven named factors were investigated using multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). The results (Table 4) identified no significant main effects or interaction effects.
Item means for the eight individual questions investigating the perceived importance of tradition, progression through grades, learning self defence skills, technical ability of instructors, cost of participating, development of confidence, underpinning philosophy and instructional style were calculated (Table 5).
Gender, experience in martial arts (quartiles) and weekly training hours (quartiles) differences in the eight individual questions were then investigated using multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). The results (Table 6) identified a significant main effect for weekly training hours with subsequent post hoc Bonferroni tests identifying significantly greater importance placed on the underpinning philosophy of the martial art (Wilks' Lambda=.29, F (24, 105) = 2.32, Partial Eta2 = 0.34, p < 0.05).
Martial artists training for more that 8 hours per week (quartile 4; mean 1.56 ± 0.86) or between 4 to 7.9 hours per week (quartile 3; mean 1.22 ± 0.42) identified the underpinning philosophy as significantly more important to them than both those who trained in up to 2.5 hours per week (quartile 1; 2.38 ± 0.96; p < 0.05 and p < 0.01 respectively) and those who trained for between 2.5 and 3.9 hours per week (quartile 2; 3.10 ± 1.20; p < 0.01 for both).
|
|
|
Fitness and Nutrition 
(0 vote)
