Abstract:

The purpose of the research is to examine the physically disabled sportspersons’ concern of catching coronavirus. In the research, descriptive survey method, from among quantitative research methods, was used. Physically disabled sportspersons, involved in sports at elite level within the body of Physically Disabled Persons’ Sports Federation of Turkey in the period of 2019-2020, constituted the research’s universe. The sample consists of a total of 192 athletes, including 47 women and 145 men, selected by random selection method from athletes in athletics, boccia, taekwondo, ts basketball, swimming, archery, curling, amputee football, ts tennis. The "Personal Information Form" consisting of 14 items and the "Athletes' Anxiety Scale for catching New Type Coronavirus (Covid-19) (SSCCNTC)", adapted into Turkish by Tekkurşun Demir et al., (2020a) were applied to the participants. As a statistical procedure, Kolmogorov–Smirnov test was applied to test whether the data were normally distributed and as a result of the normal distribution of the data, T-test and ANOVA analyzes were used. In the general findings of the research, while significant differences were determined in the sportspersons’ concerns of catching new type coronavirus as per the gender, age (socialization concern sub-dimension), educational status (socialization concern sub-dimension, and total score), disability type, disability degree, branch of sport, years of doing sports (socialization concern sub-dimension), chronic disease status, exercising status, weekly frequency of exercise (socialization concern sub-dimension), and status of being personally affected and experiencing an effect on exercises due to catching of COVID-19 by the sportspersons’ families and friends variables of physically disabled sportspersons, significant differences were not determined in the sportspersons’ concerns of catching new type coronavirus as per their age (personal concern sub-dimension, and total score), educational status (personal concern sub-dimension), familial financial status, national sportsperson status, years of doing sports (personal concern sub-dimension, and total score), weekly frequency of exercise (personal concern sub-dimension, and total score), and status of being affected from COVID-19 process variables. Consequently, it has been determined that the coronavirus epidemic, which affects the whole world, negatively affects the physically disabled athletes who have different degrees of disability participating in the research, and their anxiety levels are at a high level. In this context, it is recommended that the trainers working with the physically handicapped should reduce the anxiety levels of the athletes to the minimum level and make the necessary arrangements in their training programs so that they can increase the performance levels of their athletes.

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