A Study of Anxiety and Motivation of Swimmers after COVID-19 Lockdown

The purpose of this study is to investigate the anxiety level of the swimmers due to the lockdown and the motivation to return to swimming. For this study with the help of the purposive sampling method 20 subjects were selected and were delimited to the Amravati swimmers only. Based on literature and the researcher’s understanding, it was hypothesized that there is a significant effect of anxiety due to COVID-19 lockdown on motivation to return to the swimming of swimmers. The criterion measures of Anxiety and Motivation were adopted in this study with the help of the Three-Factor Anxiety Inventory 2 (TFAI-2; Jones et al., 2019) and Sport Motivation Scale 2 (SMS-2; Pelletier et al., 2019). With the help of google forms and what’s app or email, the data was collected. The required statistical calculations were computed with the help of SPSS software. To investigate the relative effect of anxiety on motivation to return to sports Pearson's correlation coefficient was used. To test the hypothesis, the level of significance was set at 0.05. The normality of data was tested with the help of the Shapiro-Wilk test where the non-significant ‘p’ value of anxiety was 0.480 and motivation was 0.653 which is greater than 0.05, hence the collected raw data was normally distributed. The results were found that ‘r’ value was 0.286, which was not significant at 0.05 levels of confidence as the tabulated values depicted 0.433 at the degree of freedom 19 respectively. The coefficient of correlation shows that the significant ‘p’ (0.222) value for anxiety is above 0.05. The anxiety has a value that is 0.342 which means that anxiety is not very much a strong factor in changing the swimmer’s perception and affecting their motivation. As the hypothesis formulated before was rejected and it was concluded that the swimmers are found to be less anxious and more motivated to return to swimming showing non-significant relation and effect of anxiety due to COVID-19 lockdown on the motivation of return to the swimming of swimmers from Amravati.