Sport interest as predicted by the personality measures of competitiveness, mastery, instrumentality, expressivity, and sensation seeking

The study was designed to examine sport interest in a sample of male and female university students in order to determine if the personality measures of competitiveness, instrumentality, expressivity, and sensation seeking are predictive of sport interest as well as sport participation in a variety of sports. Factor analysis of Franken's WCMP Scale (a scale that contains a variety of questions pertaining to winning, competitiveness, mastery, and persistence) produced three factors that were named: the Motivation for High Performance Scale (MHP), the Motivation for New Learning Scale (MNL), and the Importance of Winning Scale (WIN). The emergence of the MHP and WIN as distinct factors was taken as evidence for the idea that sometimes people seek out competition in order to perform at a high level or observe others perform at a high level while at other times people seek out competition in order to be a winner of observe others as winners. MHP was the best predictor of sport interest for both males and females although WIN, the Competitiveness Scale of Spence and Helmreich's Work and Family Orientation Questionnaire (WOFO), and Instrumentality were also good predictors for certain sports. MNL, the Mastery Scale of the WOFO, and Expressivity were significant predictors of sport interest but mainly in connection with female interest in figure skating and gymnastics. Sensation seeking was not a predictor of sport interest although certain subscales of Zuckerman's Sensation Seeking Scale did predict sport interest in certain instances. Analysis of sex differences indicated that female as compared to male participants were significantly more interested in gymnastics and figure skating, whereas male as compared to female participants were significantly more interested in hockey, football, baseball and basketball, golf, tennis, and boxing. Males obtained higher scores on all of the personality measures used except expressivity (where females scored significantly higher).