Effect of Values, Achievement Goals and Perceived Ability on Moral Attitudes in Sport, 1998

It is frequently claimed that sports participation per se has a beneficial effect on social and moral development. However, there is reason to believe that the display of desirable moral attitudes may be influenced by a combination of personal attributes that have not yet been investigated. These include the values which young people hold in sport, the nature of the achievement goals that they set for themselves, and their perceptions of their own ability. Recent research has indicated that young athletes may identify three types of important sets of values that guide their sports participation : socio-moral, competence and status. Furthermore, an extensive body of research has established that children adopt self-referenced or comparative criteria to evaluate their success and assess their physical ability.<br> This project investigated the combined influence of those variables on moral attitudes in a sporting context. It was accomplished by a survey of young athletes which assessed the impact of, first, their value systems, second, the nature of their achievement goals and, third, their perceptions of their physical ability, on their attitudes towards moral issues in sport. Specifically, it examined the propositions that (a) achievement goals act as mediators on the influence of values on positive and negative attitudes towards issues in fair play in adolescent athletes, and (b) that perceptions of ability act as a moderating variable in that process. The research built directly upon two previous studies carried out at the University of Brighton (these studies are not currently held at the Data Archive). The first, funded by the Sports Council, explored young athletes' value systems and moral attitudes. The second focused on interactive effect of achievement goals and perceived ability on sport persistence. The current project brought together these two related but hitherto independent research fields and contributed to the debate about the role of sport in promoting moral values and attitudes.