The relation between self-esteem levels and life quality levels of disabled and non-disabled tennis sportsmen

This research was carried out to determine the self-esteem and life quality levels of disabled and non-disabled tennis sportsmen; and also to set forth the relation between their self-esteem and life quality levels. The research group consists of total 44 sportsmen including 22 disabled tennis sportsmen (n (female)=9, n(male)=13) and 22 non-disabled tennis sportsmen (n(female)=9, n(male)=13). The personal information form developed by researchers, the World Health Organization Quality of Life Scale-National Short Form in Turkish (WHOQOL-BREF TR) and the Rosenberg Self Esteem Scale developed by Rosenberg (1965) and adapted into Turkish by Cuhadaroglu (1986) was used as data collection tool in the research. Whether data showed a normal distribution or not was studied with the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test; and at the end of this study, the t-test was used for the pair comparisons because data showed a normal distribution. The Pearson Product-Moment Correlation Coefficient technique was performed in testing whether there was a significant correlation between the two scale points. The significance level was regarded to be 0.05 in the research. At the end of the research, it was determined that the life quality levels of disabled sportsmen and non-disabled sportsmen were high generally, but their self-esteem was at a medium level. In comparing the life quality levels of sportsmen in accordance with the state of disability in the sportsmen, while no significant differences were observed in the physical, social and environmental-tr areas, a statistically significant difference was in favor of the disabled sportsmen psychologically. In comparing the self-esteem levels in the sportsmen as per whether the sportsmen were disabled or non-disabled, even if it was seen that the non-disabled sportsmen’ s self-esteem levels were higher than the disabled sportsmen, this difference was not statistically significant. Furthermore, it was found that there was not any significant correlation between the self-esteem levels and the life quality levels of the disabled and non-disabled sportsmen. Key words: Self-esteem, life quality, wheelchair tennis, disabled, sport.