Gender differences in competitive anxiety and coping strategies within junior handball national team

Abstract

Competitive anxiety is related to athletes' performance. Due to this, it is important to maintain it on an optimal level. While anxiety has a well-studied gender difference that is related to the opposite patterns of activity in left parietal and temporal lobes, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, cerebellum, and occipital gyrus, gender differences in competitive anxiety and its factors are not fully investigated. Exploratory research of competitive anxiety and coping strategies in Ukrainian junior handball national team was conducted. Participants of the study are 35 adolescences with mean age 15.63 and standard deviation equal to 0.49. 13 participants were male, while 22 participants were female. Participants completed Ways of Coping Questionnaire, which was developed by Folkman & Lazarus in 1988 and adopted byBityutskaya in 2015, and Sport Competition Anxiety Test, which was developed by Martens in 1977 and adopted by Hanin in 1982. Female athletes have significantly higher scores on both Competitive Anxiety and Accepting Responsibility scale with p=0.007 and p=0.006 respectively. Cohen’s d was 0.47 for both tests. Spearman correlation test revealed moderate correlation r = 0.39 with p = 0.02 for the whole sample. Thus, accepting responsibility coping strategy is associated with increased competition anxiety in Ukrainian athletes. Both accepting responsibility coping and competitive anxiety level is gender biased.