Assessment of Sportsmanship in Case of Institutionalized Adolescents, Deprived of Parental Cares

Abstract

Sportsmanship is a behavior, coherent to the normative standards concerning social and moral interrelation communications in the field of sport activities. Our aim is to study the purposefulness to a sportsmanlike behavior in the group of actively sporting children deprived of parental cares, who were brought up in the Bulgarian special social institutions. The respondent group includes 36 children – 27 girls, training basketball and track-and-field athletics, and 9 boys, training basketball; all are coming from children social institutions. We evaluate the meaningfulness towards fair sportive behavior using the Multidimensional Sportspersonship Orientation Scale Measurements, MSOS, developed by Vallerand, Briere, Blanchard and Provencher (1997). The children, deprived of parental cares, who were engaged in various sports, do not demonstrate lower sportsmanship standards than the children, coming from normal families and engaged in the same form of sport activities. Social status of the institutionalized children does not negatively influence their respect for the established fair play rules in case of purposeful sport activities. The athletic behavior helps to diminish the ill-tempered or harmful sportsmen manifestations in a sport competition environment. However, whether it will be transferred into a normative practice into their everyday life out of the sport terrain is a subject matter to future studies. 

Keywords: sportsmanship, adolescents, social institution, sport.