Perceived Characteristics of Selected Movement Activities

Abstract

Abstract The investigation used factor analytic procedures to identify dimensions which describe variations in college students' perceptions of selected movement activities. A sample of 1,421 college students completed a word pair association instrument in which each subject rated one of 24 movement activities on 21 word pairs. A range of dance, sport, and exercise activities representative of physical education curricular offerings were included in the study. The alpha factoring procedure with varimax rotation produced seven factors which accounted for 37.19% of the common variance: I Evaluation, II Potency, III Social Dynamics, IV Complexity, V Pace, VI Spontaneity, and VII Interaction. Incomplete principal components analysis was used to produce factor scores for each isolated factor. One-way ANOVA revealed that significant differences (α = .01) existed between activities on each of the seven factors.