AN INVESTIGATION OF DECISION-MAKING STRATEGIES OF THE VETERAN SOCCER PLAYERS

The aim of this research is to determine the decision-making strategies of veteran footballers, attended veteran football tournament organised in Trabzon in 2014, in line with several variables. The universe of the study involves all the veteran footballers attended the tournament while the population includes 196 footballers, selected through random sampling, and participated the study voluntarily. The data regarding decision-making strategies were collected by means of the questionnaire of “Melbourne Decision Making Questionnaire” (developed by Mann and others, 1998), “Decision-Making Scale” consisting 28 items (translated into Turkish by Deniz, 2004) and personal information form designed by the researcher to get demographic information of footballers. Frequency distribution was administered in determining the level of decision-making of veteran footballers, Independent Samples T-Test” was used to compare two variables, and ANOVA tests were utilised in comparing the means of variables more than two. The difference between the views of groups was analysed through considering α=0.05 significance level. In this manner, significant difference was detected between the variables of age and marital status according to the means of self-esteem scale. In addition, there was significant difference between the scores of decision-making style scale in line with the variables of education level and their position at the game. However, there was no significant difference between the scales of self-esteem and decision-making styles according to occupation and monthly income variables. To sum up, in the light of the findings of this research, we recommend playing football to develop decision-making strategies for all age groups