Evaluating The State of Mind of Sports Leaders of Children wıth Autism (Case of The Anatolian Area of Istanbul)

This research was designed to assess the state of mind of sports leaders of children with autism. Their moods were analyzed using age and gender variables. Also, suggestions were made at the end of the research based on the results of the evaluation. The population of the research comprised of sports leaders of children with autism; the sample of the research was 50 sports leaders (26 female, 24 male) of autistic children in the Anatolian area of Istanbul. The Symptoms Checklist-90 Revised (SCL-90-R) was used to determine the moods of the sports leaders. This scale was developed by Derogatis et al. (Derogatis, Lipman, Richels, 1974), and its validity and reliability studies were actualized by Kılıç (Kılıç, 2016) in Turkey. Regarding the analysis of data, frequency and percentage analyses were utilized to specify the descriptive characteristics of the sports leaders that participated in the study. T-test and Tukey test were used to review the differences in psychological symptom levels based on the descriptive characteristics of the sample group. There was no statistically significant difference in the gender variable of sports leaders of children with autism (p>0.05). As age increases, the levels of obsessive-compulsive disorder, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, anger-hostility, phobic anxiety, paranoid thought, and General Severity Index (GSI) also increase. However, a significant difference was found solely in the anxiety sub-dimension (ANX) (