Sport Participation Motivation among Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Athletes

Abstract

Every human being has a different motive within themselves when engaging or conducting a behavior or activity. Perhaps, two people who are doing a similar activity have different motives of engagement that encourage them to do the activity. Motivation is the cause and reason why an individual is doing something or more to the tendency toward an action taken. Motivation in the study is based on the purpose and the desire of athletes’ involvement in sports. This pilot study explores the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation toward sports involvement among athletes at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia by using Participation Motivation Questionnaire (PMQ), specifically on the constructs of fitness, fun, skill development, and free energy for the internal factors that influence the involvement in sports, while the external factors include achievement and status, situation factor, team spirit, and friendship. Self-administered questionnaires were distributed to a total of 30 respondents randomly selected among sport and recreation student athletes. Findings revealed that sport and recreation student athletes highly perceived achievement and status as their participation motivation in sports. However, it should be noted that constructs such as fitness, fun, skill development, free energy, situation, team spirit, and friendship are also forming the participation motivation in sports involvement among the athletes. Future research should consider a bigger sample size involving all student athletes from every faculty in the institution and also the veteran athletes who still get involved in sporting activities as researchers should study on the reason for long-term participation motivation among the veteran athletes.