Examination of the correlation between emotional intelligence and prosocial behavior of physical education and sports school students doing individual and team sports

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the association between emotional intelligence and prosocial behavior levels among university students enrolled in Schools of Physical Education and Sports who participate in individual and team sports. The relational screening model, a quantitative research tool, was employed in the study. The study group comprises of students enrolled in the 2021–2022 academic year. The research was carried out with the voluntary participation of 542 university students, and the “Revised Schutte Scale” developed by Schutte et al. (1998) and adapted to Turkish by Tatar, Tok, Saltukoğlu (2011), the “Positive Social Behavior Scale” developed by Carol and Randall (2002) and adapted by Kumru et al. (2004), and the personal information form consisting of seven questions were used in the data collection phase. In the analysis of the research data, the t-test analysis method was used to determine whether there was a difference between the groups, and the correlation test was used to determine the relationship. In the research findings, it was determined that there was a significant difference in the sub-dimensions of using emotions and optimism/mood according to gender. The gender variable revealed a significant difference in public positive social conduct, anonymous positive social behavior, immediate positive social behavior, emotional positive social behavior, obedient positive social behavior, and the total scale. There was a substantial difference in the obedient good social conduct sub-dimension among the sports types studied. As a consequence, positive moderately significant associations were found between emotional intelligence and positive social behavior traits. This finding indicates that improving university students' emotional intelligence has a modestly beneficial impact on pleasant social behaviors.