AN EXAMINATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ATHLETE'S SOCIAL APPEARANCE ANXIETY AND FATPHOBIA LEVELS

The purpose of this study is to examine whether there is a relationship between the social appearance concerns of male and female athletes and their attitudes towards overweight individuals. Athletes who registered with the special ability test (SAT) to join Physical Education and Sports Teaching and Coaching Education departments were volunteered to participate in the research. Among participants with a total of 279, 108 were female and 171 were male. The average age of female participants was 19.47 (±2.26) while the average age of male participants was 19.60 (±1.98). To collect data for the study "Social Anxiety Scale" (Do？an, 2010) and "Fatphobia Scale" (Ko？ak, Sara？, & Hürmeri？, 2005) were used. Findings revealed that the level of social anxiety of female athletes (M= 1.72±.62) was significantly lower than that of male athletes (M= 2.03±.76), t(277)= 4.55, p= .001; female athletes (M= 3.94±.72) of the level of kilophobia was higher than that of male athletes (M= 3.51±.78). However, the results of the analysis with the aim of determining the relationship between male (r= -051, n= 170, p> .05) and female (r= -.127, n= 108, p> .05) athletes' social appearance anxiety and the degree of fatphobia showed that social appearance anxiety and kiloaphobia scores were not statistically significant between gender