The Differences between Deaf Athletes and Deaf Non Athletes in the Levels of Self Respect

This research aims to determine and find the significance level of the difference of self respect of handicapped national team level athletes and people who are not involved in sports activities. The relationships of self respects of handicapped national team level athletes and people who are not involved in sports activities were examined. We looked into the differences of self respect between athletes who compete in deaf handicapped national Judo team, which is a martial art sports branch, and people who are not involved in sports activities. We looked into the self respect relationship between sportsmen who compete in deaf handicapped national volleyball team and people who are not involved in sports activities. A portion of athletes from deaf Olympics team held in Taiwan (DEAFOLYMPIC) participated in the research. The sample of this study consists of 53 voluntary participating people in whom 23 of them are experiment (national athlete) and 30 are sedentary (non athlete deaf). Coppersmith self respect scale is employed. A personal information form that was prepared by the researcher was use to determine the demographic properties. SPSS 11.5 statistical package program was used to conduct ‘Mann Whitney U Test’ analyses with the data. A statistically significant difference was found in this study. In this study the self respect of deaf handicapped athletes is found to be higher than the deaf handicapped people who are not involved in sports activities. It is seen that sports affects personal character of hearing impaired people.