2016 Volume 62 Issue Suppl.1 Pages 88-89
Introduction: School athletic clubs serve as central sites of sports activities for many junior and senior high school students in Japan. School athletic clubs preserve the traditions of pre-war junior and senior high schools, and constitute a sports-education system unique to Japan. Although other countries maintain athletic clubs, only in Japan is there a system, an environment, and leaders (school teachers) under which school athletic clubs seek to win national championships. This system is characterized by the incorporation of sport within school-based education; this arrangement allows students to regularly perform athletic activities. Three million junior and senior high school students spend 700 hours each on athletic club activities annually. These facts indicate a large number of school athletic clubs performing extremely intensive physical training activities. The question thus arises: do school athletic clubs’ activities truly cultivate the minds and spirits of young athletes, given the current environment has these problems? In our study, we surveyed athletes belonging to school athletic clubs to examine relationships between concepts related to mental strength and ideas about sports. The authors specifically addressed sport commitment and resilience. Scanlan et al. proposed a theory of sport commitment, which describes athletes’ persistence in, connection with, and devotion to sports. Research has examined resilience since the 1990s; in Japan, resilience has been discussed in terms of ‘ability to recover’ and ‘restoration of strength’. Resilience has also been considered ‘mental strength’, which enables one to recover from stress or negative life events, and to recuperate after harm. Additionally, as students may experience a variety of stressors unique to school athletic clubs, stress measures specific to these clubs were used. This study aimed to investigate relationships among these factors.
Method: Anonymous questionnaire surveys were administered. Participants were students (n=203) attending private high schools in the Tokyo metropolitan district. Questionnaires were (1) Hagiwara et al.’s Commitment to Sports Scale, (2) the Resilience Scale developed by Yamagishi and revised by Oshio and Ishige et al., (3) Shibukura et al.’s Stressor Scale for High School Athletic Club Members, and (4) a face sheet inquiring whether the participant is a member of a school athletic club. For followup investigation, each participant was issued a password. Data were collected from the 11th to the 15th of May 2015.
Results: Factor analysis of Resilience Scale scores extracted five factors that differed slightly from factors reported in previous research: ‘positive future orientation and optimism’, ‘pursuit of novelty’, ‘emotional adjustment and optimism’, ‘relationship orientation’, and ‘metacognition orientation and emotional adjustment’. Factor analysis of scores on the Stressor Scale for High School Athletic Club Members extracted the same five factors as in previous research: ‘competitiveness’,‘coaches’, ‘practice time’, ‘comrades’, and ‘injury or illness’.(The rest of omitted)
