An Examination of the Athletic Identities of High School Students

The aim of this study is to determine the athletic identities of elite student athletes engaging in individual and team sports in high schools. The study group consisted of 1034 elite student athletes, 302 female and 732 male. The mean age of the student athletes is 16.85 ± 1.87. Descriptive scanning model was used in the study. Personal Information Form and Athletic Identity Questionnaire (AIQ) were used to collect the data. In the analysis, first of all, the data were examined with SPSS22 to observe whether they showed normal distribution. Afterwards, of the parametric tests, Independent Samples T-test, One Way Anova test and correlation analysis were used in the analysis of the collected data. In terms of individual and team sports student athletes, a significant difference was found in favor of individual student athletes in terms of total score of athletic identity and all sub-dimensions. As a result of the analysis, it was found that women student athletes, the ones who have athletic history in their families and national student athletes have a stronger athletic identity, and that the age of student athletes increases, the level of encouragement of the family decreases, in addition to this, it was concluded that student athletes doing individual sports, give more importance to their physical appearance, and the activity they do and feel more adequate when doing physical activities than team student athletes.