The Exploration of Physical Self-Efficacy and a Youth Sport Program for Adolescent Girls

Abstract

Despite the proven psychosocial benefits, sport participation levels of adolescent girls have decreased over the last two decades. Reasons for the decline in participation have been linked to a variety of barriers faced by adolescent girls. In particular, many current youth sport programs do not offer the components to attract and maintain the interest of girls. Physical self-efficacy is an important component for exercise adherence and participation. However, few researchers have examined physical self-efficacy and sport participation of adolescent girls.

Exploring the psychosocial construct of physical self-efficacy is important in relation to girls' participation in physical activity and sport. The purpose of my study was to determine if adolescent girls participating in a youth running program would score higher on physical self efficacy than adolescent girls not participating in the youth running program.

The Physical Self-Efficacy Scale (Ryckman et al., 1982) was used to investigate physical self-efficacy for a sample of 40 adolescent girls, ages 8 to 12 years old from Wake and Durham counties participating in the youth running program compared to a sample of 13 adolescent girls, ages 9 to 11 years old from Wake County, not participating in the program. A t-test for Equality of Means and a non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test were used to test the significance of the relationships between the experimental group and the control group. No statistically significant difference was found in the means or mean ranks of the physical self-efficacy components.