The effects of swimming training program on psychological health: An experimental design

Abstract

The present experimental study was conducted to change the locus of control of university students in positive direction through their participation in a swimming training program as a group. For this purpose, 40 volunteer university students participated in the study and they were randomly assigned to experiment and control groups. Each group consisted of 20 students. The experiment group participated in the swimming training program which was conducted in three sessions, each lasting one hour a week. During this period, the control group did not participate in any regular physical activity program regarding swimming training. In this training program, series of freestyle swimming sessions were provided to the university students who had never received any formal swimming instruction before. Rotter’s Locus of Control was administered to the participants before and after the 10-week training period. The data was analyzed using SPSS 16.0 Package Program. Descriptive statistics, independent sample t-test and paired samples t test were used to analyze the data. Level of significance was determined to be 0.05. There was a statistically significant difference between experiment group’s pre-test and post-test scores (p<0.05). There was not a significant difference between control group’s pre-test and post-test scores (p>0.05). Participants in the experiment group showed more changing in positive direction than those in the control group in terms of the internal locus of control.