Abstract
People participating in sports and physical activities have various motives. The purpose of the present investigation was to compare the participants' motives in competitive sport versus physical activity. Subjects were 580 including 250 competitive sport and 330 physical activity participants. A questionnaire adopted from the research by Weinberg et al was administered to all participants. The results from Mann-Whitney U and Freidman tests revealed that there was a significant difference between the physical activity and competitive sport participants' motivation. Competitive sport participants are at higher motivational level than physical activity participants. The physical activity participants showed higher levels in motives such as fitness, intrinsic and extrinsic and energy release. In contrast, competitive sport participants were at higher levels in motives such as competition, intrinsic, fun/enjoyment and fitness. The results indicated that the female participants in physical activity showed higher levels of motivation comparing to the male participants, except in competition motive which males showed higher level. Also there found to be no significant difference in motivation between female and male participants in competitive sport, but female athletes had higher scores in motives such as intrinsic, fun, social energy and team work.
