Coach’s perception of parent’s attitudes in school-age sports

Abstract

The coach-parent relationship can significantly influence the sport participation, personal development, and sports performance of young athletes. This study aimed to investigate the coach’s perception of parent’s attitudes regarding competition attitude, the communication with the coach, and the environment during training sessions, taking into account the coaches’ sex, type of institu-tion, or sport modality grouped into individual and collective sports. For this, a total of 159 coaches (22 females and 137 males) responded to the Questionnaire for Sports Coaches about their Opinion on the Attitudes of Fathers and Mothers in Sports (CTPMD). It analyses three factors: (1) competition attitude, (2) communication, and (3) environment. A Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was necessary to assess the model's goodness of fit on each factor and to calculate the Cronbach’s Alpha, the average variance extracted, and the composite reliability to analyze the instrument reliability. Descriptive and inferential analysis was performed through the Mann-Whitney U and Rosenthal r statistical tests. The results showed significant differences in the competition attitude factor regarding type of institution (U = 1964.500; p-value < 0.001; r = 0.31), in favour of public institutions. There were also significant differences in the communication factor according to the coaches’ sex (U = 1112.000; p-value = 0.04; r = 0.16), with females’ coaches perceiving worse communication with parents than male coaches. This could be relevant because it negatively influences adherence to physical activity in children and adolescents, and therefore, their health.