Communication skill levels of trainers according to the perception of B2-B3 visually impaired athletes

Abstract

Communication is a powerful tool for the trainer. And the trainers' tool is communication. A good trainer must have good communication skills. The trainers having good communication skills are successful. The propose of this research is to evaluate the effects of different variables (factors) on the trainers' communication skill levels, according to the perceptions of visually impaired athletes. 39 male, 59 female, totally 98 visually impaired athletes from sport clubs in different provinces participated in the study voluntarily. The trainer communication skill scale, developed by Yilmaz in 2008, is a five point Likert type- scale includes 48 items in total and the items of it are expressed as "never, sometimes, very little, quite a lot, always". The total Cronbach-Alpha of the trainer communication skill scale was found to be 0.973. In this study, in which trainer communication skills were analyzed, SPSS 22.00 Program was used, which is used in quantitative research methods. In the study, T test and One Way Variance Analysis (One-Way ANOVA) were used for mean, standard deviation, frequency, independent samples. No significant difference was detected in the communication skills of the trainers according to the variables gender, disability status, sports branch, visual level, year of doing sports, and the year of working with the trainer (p>0.05). In conclustion, as a finding of the study, it is observed that the communication skills of the trainers affected all the characteristics of the visually impaired athletes taken place in the training process. Communication is an extremely important and effective tool for visually impaired individuals, as they are visually impaired. Working with a trainer with good communication skills for visually impaired athletes will lead them to success. Communication is their nonexistent eye. They can easily reach the information they need by communicating. Through the communication, their lives get facilitated and they become socialized by entering the society. Since their communication is good, their persuasion power is high. Again, because of their good communication, their education level is high. They can seek their rights and are not dependent on anyone. Thanks to communication, they are free. They have represented our country in the paralympics in various sports branches and have been successful. Because of their good communication, they have made their existence accepted in the society. In the study we conducted, not significant difference was found between the variables because their expectations or emotional thoughts were the same.