Investigation of Speech Anxiety Levels of Physical Education and Sports Department Students in Terms of Different Variables

The aim of this study is to determine the speech anxiety levels of physical education and sports department students and to examine them in terms of different variables. The research was carried out with 202 students (66 female and 136 male) studying in different departments of Erzurum Ataturk University Faculty of Sports Sciences in 2108/2019 academic year. The data related to the study were collected by Speech Anxiety Scale developed by Yaman and Sofu (2013) and the Demographic Information Form determined by the researchers. Frequency distribution was used to determine the students' demographic characteristics, Independent Samples T-test was used to examine the differentiation between two independent variables and speech anxiety and One-Way ANOVA analysis was used to examine the differentiation between more than two variables and speech anxiety. All these tests were analyzed in SPSS 21 package program and the significance level was accepted as p <0.05. As a result of the research, it was determined that there was no significant difference between the students' demographic characteristics, sporting activities and speech anxiety levels. Although there was no significant difference, it was also observed that the male students' total score of speech anxiety was lower than that of female students numerically. It was observed that, regarding the students' family structure variable, those who had a fragmented family, who had a monthly personal income level of over 1501 TL, who studied in the department of management, did sports activities and performed both sports as regards their sports activity type, had numerically a low level of speaking anxiety when compared to other variable groups. In the light of these results, it is suggested that students should be encouraged to participate in sports activities and to engage in different social activities in order to reduce their speech anxiety levels. Apart from this study, it is recommended to investigate using different variables and to determine the variables that may have a positive or negative effect on speech anxiety.