Introvert Vs Extrovert in Sport: Personalities and Social Interactions

Introduction

Everyone has a different level of extroversion. We can generally distinguish into 2 contrasting traits which are introvert vs extrovert. According to Iosr journals, & Fatma Hsain Ali Suliman. (2015), the definitions of these contrasting personalities are below: introvert means emotions and feelings have a higher priority to concern than things outsides himself/herself; extrovert means “a person who is more concerned with what is happening around him than in his own emotions and thoughts”. Personality is born. Yet it can be changed through personal experience. For example, people that are always touched, have habits and important experiences (Jang, K., Livesley, W., & Vemon, P., 1996). In the place of working, too introvert may get disadvantages in communicating with customers and co-workers. Especially in this related society, if a staff does not have good communication with their co-worker and superiors, even if they have high abilities, this person cannot have a promotion to manager level as they mostly do have not enough management skills. Moreover, research written by Barton, K., & Cattell, R. (1972) shows that some introvert characteristics have more tendency to not have a job promotion. Meanwhile, too introverted is a huge disadvantage to build new affiliations with others, especially for kids and autistic people. It may influence their growth if they lack communication with peers. People around them feel that they are strange and hard to mix in.

For the autism children, there is a huge difference compared with normal children. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association (2000), one of the definitions of Children's Autism is “Impairments in socialization and social interactions”. This definition included disabled to develop peer relationships with children of the same age. According to the statistics of Census and Statistics Department (2019), there are about 9500 autistic students in Hong Kong in 2019. The ratio of autistic students and normal students is not high, yet it is still a serious and complex problem to deal with.

Significance of the Study on Introvert vs Extrovert

By doing this research, we would like to find out whether doing sport is a method to turn one’s introversion into extroversion. If this research question is valid, those people who have introvert personalities can have an easy way to address or soothing down the barriers of communicating with others. For the workers, it can reinforce their affiliation with their co-workers and have a higher quality of cooperation. Other than the workplace, children can make new friends normally and own a better childhood life.

Another serious significance of this study is that helping autistic people to build their own peer relationships, and even success to assimilate into normal society. On a macro view, it may be an inspiration to the world to handle the problems of autistic people through sports and develop a specific sports teaching technique for autistic children as there is no such method to address autism.

Literature Review

To discuss this topic, we have to introduce personality. There are so many theories to determine a personality. Such as the Three Dimensions of personality came up by Eysenck, H. (1992). It contains introversion/extroversion, neuroticism/emotional stability, and psychoticism. Another theory about personality is 16 Personality Factors proposed by Bentley, M., & Cattell, R. (1951). It is more detailed than that of Eysenck, H. Later they designed a 16PF Questionnaire containing over 150 questions for the users to find out what traits they have. One of the factors is warmth means the level of outgoing. However, lots of researchers are believing the Big Five Dimensions of Personality as known as the OCEAN model (Power, R., & Pluess, M. (2015) as the former is too little and the latter is too much to determine. Therefore, the big five dimensions is starting from Fiske, D. (1949) and then further expanded by other researchers like Norman, W. (1967), Smith, G. (1967), Hofstee, W., De Raad, B., & Goldberg, L. (1992). Those 5 factors are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Openness means how open to trying new things; conscientiousness means how thoughtful the person is; extraversion means outgoing, we usually called extrovert and introvert to represent the high and low levels of extraversion; agreeableness means how trustworthy, kind, and other prosocial behaviors; neuroticism means the emotional instability and sadness. In our study, we will focus on the extraversion trait as it is the most direct to relate to outgoing and sport. The idea of Introversion and extroversion are included in both 3 explanations or taxonomy. Thus, “introversion and extroversion” is one of the most important traits in a human’s personality.

Beyond the Five Dimensions of Personality, there are 4 types of personality which are different combinations of the 5 dimensions (Gerlach, M., Farb, B., Revelle, W., & Nunes Amaral, L., 2018). These combinations are average, reserved, role-model, and self-centered.

Sport is always a useful tool. The benefits of doing sport have been well-spread out all over the world. It not only contains the physical benefits like increasing the muscle's strength so that it can effectively protect bones and viscera but also the mental benefits. Lots of research shows that sports can make people increase people’s happiness and prevent dementia (González, J., Fernández, J., Ordóñez, B., & Morales, B., 2017; Tsuji, T., Kanamori, S., Miyaguni, Y., Hanazato, M., & Kondo, K., 2019).

Research Questions

1. Is sport related to extroversion?
2. What will affect the effectiveness of sport to affect personality?

Methodology

Questionnaire Design

Around 20 questions in 2 parts will be included. The first part is about their personality. Here the survey will reference the quick personality test designed by Psych Central Research Team (2019). There is a Five Dimensions of Personality test on the webpage of this research team. If I enter the data that I collect from the respondent, I can get the correct result. This method can avoid any misunderstanding of the test as it only needs to input the data but not analyze whether the respondent is introverted or extroverted by myself. The second part is to find out the habits of doing exercises or sports of the respondents. For example, how many times they would do exercise in a month, and, what kinds of sport they usually do. Therefore, interval and nominal choice of answer will be applied to the survey questions. The expected time of finishing the entire survey of each respondent is within 10 minutes.

Data Collection

In this research, the quantitative method will be used as the aim of this research is only to find out the existence of the relationship between sports and the level of extroversion. Based on the size of this research, the sample size will be around 100 respondents. The method of collection will be done in two ways simultaneously. The first way is via the Internet. We will transfer the questionnaire into a Google form. All the questions will be the same as the normal ones. Using the Google form can save time and human resources. We will encourage respondents to send out the Google form to their friends and family after finishing the questionnaire so that the snowball effect can be applied. The minimum number of responses from Google Forms is 40. However, the major problem is that responses via the internet are mostly teenagers as they are the most frequent users of the internet. If all responses are from Google Forms, the ratio of the age will not balance and affect the reliability of this research. Thus, the second way is the physical questionnaires. We will print some 70 questionnaires and collect in the both elderly and children's community centers. The expected finish time of the data collection period is within 2 months.

After the survey, we would be able to find out the respondents’ age, gender, personality, frequency of doing sports, type and strength of the sports. No names and other private data will be collected due to ethnic concern. All data will be ruined immediately after the study is finished.

Data Analysis

First of all, all the data will be transformed into a table form and bar chart. The question of finding the frequency of doing exercise and their personality will be fitted into a line table. The dependent variable is the personality and the independent variable is the frequency of doing exercise. By applying this method, the relationship between sport and personality will be clear to display. Also, the types of sports that are responded to will be given a rank number based on the intensity in ascending order. For instance, table tennis is the first, football is second and rugby is at the last.

In order to determine whether sports can relate to personality, we will focus on the personality and the habit of doing sports or exercise. The first research question is valid if most of the respondents who have extrovert personalities are frequently doing sports or exercise. Some key observations will be focused on if the first research question is valid. Those are the hypothesis we think may be a factor affecting the effectiveness.

The first thing is gender. We will compare the effect of genders because males and females have some differences intrinsically. According to the research of Lever (1978), the tendency of type of sports between boys and girls are different. Boys are “more likely than girls to engage in sport-related activities that involve teams, complex rule systems, and high level of interdependency”. Therefore, gender is a potential factor to affect effectiveness. We expect males would affect more.

The second focal point is the types of sports. Those types will be divided into 2 sides. One is an individual sport, which means the sports are mainly done by a single person. For example, long-running and swimming; another side is a group sport, which means it needs more than one person to do. The most significant example is ball games. The reason of dividing in such a method is that we want to find out whether the communication during exercise can help to influence the personality. This point may be also considering the gender based on the above research. We expect that the group sport will be more likely to change introversion.

The third one is the frequency of doing sports. In this part, we would like to see whether the frequency is related to the effectiveness. Is that more introverted people would be more frequently doing sport? We think that the frequency can be a booster to reinforce the effectiveness. In this part, we expect that the more frequently to doing sport, the more likely to contain higher effectiveness.

The last is the age. Various of researches have proved that once people arrived at a certain age, they will tend to be unchanged and refuse to accept new things. On the other hand, the acceptance of new things of smaller age is higher. However, some elderly would learn new things after they are retired. That means they are willing to change. Therefore, we think age may be a factor affecting the effectiveness of sports affecting personality. We expect younger people will tend to have higher effectiveness.

Conclusion

In conclusion, in this study, we would like to find out whether sport is related to extroversion, and then what will affect the effectiveness of sports affects personality. We will use a questionnaire to find out people’s habits in doing sports and their personalities. If this research can be done, people who are introverted and have problems in communicate with others, autism people will benefit the most.

References

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