An assessment on superstituoius beliefs among national level basketball player

Superstition is defined as a collection of unreasonable beliefs about the cause and the effect, i.e. the conviction that the future is affected by certain actions without any logical casual relationship. It is important to make a difference between superstitions and prejudices, defined as certain attitudes which are not based on rational arguments or experiences but are results of one's subjective opinion and generalization. The purpose of the study was to investigate the superstitious beliefs among the national level basketball players. The data for the study comprised of 381 national and state level basketball players between the age group of 15 to 35 participated in youth junior and senior national championship between 2011 to 2014. To achieve the purpose of the study 157 no. of boys 224 no. of girls whole heartedly participated during their participation in national championship approved by basketball federation of India. The average age of the students were under 16 in youth, under 18 in junior, and above in senior. The data for this study collected from the sample with the Superstitious Ritual questionnaires (SRQ) (Bleak & Frederick, 1998), which will measure superstitious beliefs, behavior and rituals. It was hypothesized that there will be significant difference in superstitious beliefs among different age groups of national level basketball players. The data pertaining to Superstitious Beliefs was tested using multivariate Analysis of Variance(MANOVA) and Analysis of variance(ANOVA) for analyzing the differences exist between grouping variables. The ANOVA results reveals that the dependent variable, Team rituals found significant differ between groups viz.; youth, junior and senior. The pair wise comparison shows that, the male Basketball players is having highest superstitions beliefs. The study also concluded that he players belonging to youth category are more superstitious compared to juniors and seniors.