Rural athletes awareness and utilisation of physiotherapy services survey

This study researched awareness and utilisation of physiotherapy services by non-elite athletes of Rural communities in Eastern Cape South Africa. Non-elite athletes playing rugby, cricket, netball and soccer were given online questionnaire survey to obtain their awareness and utilisation of physiotherapy services. The data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software, version 30. Descriptive statistics were utilized to summarize the demographic characteristics of the participants and to describe the awareness, utilization, and attitudes towards physiotherapy services. Items that provided solely ordinal (Likert-type) response options were assessed using non-parametric methods. Since no participants chose a “do not know” option for these items, the variables remained distinctly ordinal. The Mann–Whitney U (MW) test was employed to compare two independent groups for these ordinal variables. Variables with non-ordered nominal response options, Chi-square and Fisher’s tests were used. The Chi-square test was used to assess the associations between demographics and categorical variables. If any expected cell counts in the contingency tables were below five, Fisher’s Exact test was used, as it delivers a more precise estimate under such circumstances. To test for normality of continuous variables, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk tests were used, and none of the continuous variables were found to be normally distributed; accordingly, nonparametric Spearman correlations were employed. For both the MW and Spearman tests, the median (Mdn) and interquartile range (IQR) were reported alongside the mean (M) and standard deviation (SD) as these tests are nonparametric and, in these cases, the Mdn and IQR are more appropriate than the M and SD. For all inferential tests, statistical significance was defined as p < 0.05.