Abstract:

This study aims to discover the levels of narcissism among university students, who are actively involved in sports, in order to reveal the differences between narcissism levels and sociodemographic variables. A total of 611 athletes participated in the study, of whom 236 were females (38.6%) and were males 375 (61.4%). They all have actively participated in individual and team sports that were organized by the Turkish University Sports Federation. For the purpose of determining the narcissism levels of the athletes, the “Narcissistic Personality Inventory”, which was developed by Ames et al. (2006) and adapted into Turkish by Atay (2009), was used. The scale consisted of 16 items representing 6 dimensions “exhibitionism”, “superiority”, “authority”, “entitlement”, “self-sufficiency”, and “exploitativeness”. The study data were analysed by utilizing IBM SPSS Statistics v22 package software was used. To reveal whether the data had a normal distribution, a single-sample “Kolmogorov-Smirnov” test was conducted and it was discovered that the data did not distribute a normal distribution. Following these initial evaluation, it was decided to use the non-parametric test methods. In the comparison of narcissism levels of athletes with demographic variables, the “Mann Whitney U Test” was conducted for two-sample comparisons while “Kruskal Wallis-H Test” was conducted for comparisons between three and/or more samples. Additionally, the “Mann Whitney U test” was conducted to determine the groups with significant differences. The level of significance was regarded as p < 0.05. In conclusion, it was observed that the mean total scores of athletes in the “Narcissistic Personality Inventory” was 7.11 ± 3.26. When the relationships between the narcissism levels and demographic variables of athletes were examined, significant differences were observed between the narcissistic tendencies of athletes and the variables of gender, age, and department of education. Finally, when the literature was examined, it was seen that the athletes in the sample had an acceptable level of narcissism.

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