Effect of skill and personality on activity choice

Abstract

This was a two phase, experimental study conducted at Westby, Wisconsin high school. The first phase was designed to test the hypothesis that there exists a relationship between a person's skill in an activity and his desire to participate in the activity. The second phase was designed to determine if an individual's personality affected the aforementioned relationship. Forty students, 21 girls and 19 boys, were given skill tests in archery, softball, tennis, and volleyball. This resulted in an activity skill ranking. The forty students were then required to fill out an activity preference form. This resulted in an activity preference ranking. The activity skill ranking was correlated with the activity preference ranking and the results were: r =.418 for the boys, r = .643 for the girls, and r = .548 for both. From this, the conclusion was made that there exists positive relationship between skill in an activity and the desire to participate in the activity. The forty students were given the Edward Personality Test. Each student was placed into a high correlation group or a low correlation group and each personality factor was divided into a high group and a low group. This resulted in a mutual exclusive two by two table and a chi-square test was then used to significance. From this phase or the study, it was impossible to make any clear cut conclusions. There did seem to be certain trends in differences between the personalities of those in the high correlation group compared with those in the low correlation group but trends were not significant.