Examining The Impact of Campus Intramural Sports Participation on Students’ Sense of Community Using A Pre-Test Post-Test Design

Abstract

Participation in out-of-class activities and campus recreation/intramural sports are some of the most popular activities for students on college campuses and one of the most beneficial social outlets for students. However only recently has this connection been examined more deeply. Due to the overwhelming number of students participating in these programs and services it is important to examine the impact of participation in an attempt to better understand the degree to which involvement in campus recreational sports contributes to students’ sense of community. The purpose of this quantitative pre-test post-test study was to examine changes in students’ perceived sense of community over the duration of an intramural season. One hundred and forty-seven intramural participants (N=147) completed a pre-test questionnaire on their first week of their intramural sport season and a post-test on their last week of their intramural sport season. The initial plan of analysis to complete a Repeated Measures Multiple Analysis of Co-Variance (MANCOVA) was stopped promptly due to high mean scores from participants. For each question and factor the data was so consistently skewed and high it was simply not normally distributed leading to assumptions to be broken immediately. A Non-parametric design model Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to analyze the data instead which indicates that there was not a significant change testing factors mean score ranks between the pre and post-test. This finding demonstrates that there was not a significant difference in participants perception of sense of community but rather participants had high perceived feelings of sense of community both times they were tested. This study supports the findings of previous research which has found that those students who are involved in recreational sports in a post-secondary environment receive both perceived feelings of sense of community but also relationship building opportunities and experiences. Future research should focus on studying perceptions of sense of community and to explore other areas of a campus community, such as; clubs, varsity sports teams, events, etc. Through studying other areas of a campus community there would be the ability to indicate if there are differences or similarities between feelings of sense of community by specific programs.