Summary: | The purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to develop and to test the Perceived Health & Sport Participation Profile (PHSPP) Questionnaire; (b) to examine the relationship between athletes’ perceived health, goal orientation, self-esteem, physical self perception and sport satisfaction. The main theoretical framework used in this study is the Perceived Health & Sport Participation model (PH&SP) (Stambulova, Johnson, Lindwall & Hinic, 2005). A package of five questionnaires was completed by 139 competitive athletes representing different types and levels of sport. The data treatment involved descriptive statistics, correlation, factor, and regression analyses performed with the SPSS. A test-re-test was also performed on the PHSPP questionnaire with 30 subjects. The study confirmed major parts of the PH&SP-model and its link to some established concepts and theories, e.g., athletic identity and goal orientation. Factor analyses of the PHSPP resulted in eight extracted factors explaining 61.46% of the total variance of the questionnaire with alpha values between 0.71 and 0.89 for all the factors. Test-re-test reliability appeared as satisfactory. Regression analyses showed that social influences on athletes contribute more to unhealthy than to healthy sport participation. Analyses also confirmed that healthy sport participation contributes to satisfaction with health and sport participation, and unhealthy sport participation contributes to dissatisfaction with health and sport participation. The results are discussed in relation to the corresponding literature and the PH&SP-model. Key words: competitive athletes, perceived health, social influences, sport satisfaction.
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