Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaften

Abstrakt

Influence of sports culture for the development of wellness of tribal women- Jadavpur University, India

Asish Paul

Statement: “Wellness is an active process through which people become aware of, and make choices toward, a more successful existence.” --National Wellness Institute. Culture is an integrated system of learned behaviour patterns which are characteristic of the members of a society and which is not a result of biological inheritance. The social culture with regular physical activity contributes to the potential developmental status with optimum health and better quality of livelihood. Exercises comprised of movement and different games have some positive benefits to the wellbeing of human being. Purpose: The purpose of the study was to find out the influence of a 12 week (from December to February) sports culture programme on the wellbeing of middle-aged tribal women. Methodology: The randomized control trial methods were used. 45 tribal women aged between 20-40 years from one village of Purulia district, were considered as experimental group and another 25 tribal women of same age range from another village of Purulia were considered as the control group. The distance of these two villages were 10 km. having same climate, socioeconomic status and infrastructural facilities. The subjects underwent training for six day in a week for 1 hour daily. The sports culture programme included walking, running, stretching, joint mobility exercises, calisthenics, playing volleyball, badminton, Yogasana, etc. There were lecture session about personal health and hygiene, diet and nutrition, importance of exercise etc. The wellbeing status was measured through the five dimensions of total wellness, such as physical wellbeing, mental wellbeing, social wellbeing, emotional wellbeing and spiritual wellbeing by the questionnaire. The pre and post-tests were conducted on the subjects to collect the data on the variables of the study. Findings and Conclusions: The statistical calculation shows that significant development occurred only in case of spiritual wellbeing with moderate development in case of other factors of wellness, but no significant changes occurred in case of the control group, although slight development occurred. It was concluded that the sports culture comprising of regular physical exercises, playing different sports and some theoretical informative classes has positive beneficial effects upon the total wellness in case of the tribal women