The Effect of Primary School Students' Participation in Active Games involving Physical Movement on Life Satisfaction

Abstract

This study intends to determine the impact of the participation of second grade elementary school students in gamesinvolving physical activities on their Life Satisfaction. The sample of the study consisted of 706 students in 6 primary schools inthe province of Gaziantep in the academic year 2016-2017. The “Playfulness scale” was used in order to determine the students' attitudes towards playing games with physical activity,and the“life satisfaction scale” was used to assess their impact on the satisfaction they get from life. The playfulness scale wasdeveloped by Hazar (2015) while the Life Satisfaction Scale used in the study is the one translated by Sevil (2015) into Turkish. Statistical analyzes were performed on the data obtained in the study by using the SPSS 22.0 package program. In theevaluation of data, frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation were used while the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was used inthe conformity check of continuous variables to normal distribution. The Student T-Test was conducted to compare the twoindependent groups of variables with normal distribution, and the ANOVA and Tukey multiple comparison tests wereconducted for the comparison of more than two independent groups of variables and the correlation between the numericalvariables was tested through Correlation analysis. According to the findings; 73.4% of the participants were in the age bracket of 11-12 years (518 people) and 26.6% werebetween the ages of 13-14 (188 people). 58.9% were female (416 people) and 41.1% (290 people) were male and 51.1% of themwere in the 5th grade (354), 22.7% in the 6th grade (160 people) and 27.2% (190 people) in the 7th grade. It was established thatthere was a significant difference between the ages of the students in the Playfulness Scale and the Life Satisfaction Scale;between the students’ grades in the Playfulness Scale and the Life Satisfaction Scale as well as a low degree of meaningfulrelationship between the Playfulness Scale and the Life satisfaction scale.