Independence And Interdependence In Sports

Context

This is the dataset I created for my Bachelor's thesis in Sports Sciences. The purpose was finding differences in the self-construal (indepence vs interdependence) of people practicing team, individual and trend sports.
I used an online questionnaire to gather the data. Self-construal was accessed using the Self-Construal-Scale (Singelis, 1994). This scale evaluates participants independence (from other people) and their interdepence (with other people) with 12 questions each. Apart from that, each participant had to identify their most important sport and how they perform it.

Content

What's inside is more than just rows and columns. Make it easy for others to get started by describing how you acquired the data and what time period it represents, too.

• index - number of completed questionnaire
• importance - How important is sport for you? Scale 1-7
• sport - With which sport do you identify the most?
• frequency - How often do you practise any sport? Scale 1-8, 1 being less than once a week, 2 once a week, ..., 8 every day
• how_alone - How do you prefer practising? Alone?
• how_small_groups - How do you prefer practising? In small groups?
• how_big_groups - How do you prefer practising? In big groups?
• independence - mean value for independence from 1 to 7 (7 means highest independence)
• interdependence - mean value for interdependence from 1 to 7 (7 means highest interdependence)
• sex - gender of participant
• age - age of participant
• education - highest degree of education, scale 1-9

Inspiration

• How do athletes from different sports differ in their independence/interdependence?
• Are there differences according to gender, age, education or how they perform sports?
• Is it sensible to group the athletes into team, individual and trend sports oder do you find a better classification?

This was the abstract of my thesis (Feld, 2014). Maybe you can also try to reconstruct the findings or try finding more interesting facts.

Team, individual and trend sport athletes were compared to find differences in in-
dependence and interdependence. Male and female athletes‘ results were evaluat-
ed seperatly from each other. The athletes had to complete a survey about their
sport behavior including their most important sports and the Self-Construal-Scale to
classify them into their group and to obtain an individual score on each independ-
ence and interdependence. Differences were found in both independence and in-
terdependence. Team sport athletes scored higher in independence than individual
sport athletes. Trend sport athletes reached a higher score for interdependence
compared to the other athletes. Female trend sport athletes also proved to have a
higher interdependence than the other female groups. Furthermore, the study iden-
1tified female athletes as more independent and less interdependent than male ath-
letes. Other significant differences could not be found. However, a subsequent
moderation analysis showed that there exists a positive correlation between inter-
dependence and importance of sports.

References

Feld, H. (2014). Differences of Independence and Interdependence between Team, Individual and Trend Sport Athletes. (Unpublished bachelor's thesis). Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany.
Singelis, T. M. (1994). The Measurement of Independent and Interdependent Self-Construals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20(5), 580–591.