THE EFFECT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL CONCENTRATION ON THE PERFORMANCE OF RIFLE SHOOTERS IN SRI LANKA NAVY REPRESENTING THE NATIONAL POOL

Abstract

Concentration and mental success provides the toughness and margins of victory. Rifle shooting is one of the most psychologically challenging of all sports that is highly involved with concentration. Consequently the purpose of this quantitative research was to establish the effect of psychological concentration on the performance of rifle shooters (RS) in Sri Lanka Navy representing the national pool. The research was conducted under the pretest- posttest control group design with a sample of twelve (n=12).The treatment receiving group consisted with eight RS (four women and four men) and four RS were taken as the control group with stratified random sampling design (stratified by gender equal numbers for each). The awareness of concentration techniques were explored through a primary questionnaire survey which consisted with 28 questions in organized with three sections as Demographic (07), Rifle shooting (07) and concentration (14) questions, it revealed that 50% of the RS in the sample were unaware of such techniques. Basically six concentration techniques were introduced including self-talk, mental rehearsal, meditation, non-judgmental thinking, and eye control and overlearn skill.Mentionned techniques were applied only to the experimental group(x) throughout a period of two months. Data were analyzed on Paired T test, Wilcoxon sign rank test and Mann-Whitney test by using SPSS (V23), MS office 2013 softwares. Pretest results comparison specified that there was no significant difference between the performances of pretest and posttest in terms of marks at high significance (0.008).Hence the above null hypothesis couldn’t be rejected and was concluded that there was no significant difference in control group in terms of their marks. There was a significant difference between experimental group and control group (p = 0.001). Therefore, null hypothesis was rejected and it can be concluded that the concentration techniques have caused a significant increase in their marks for performance. Hence that techniques applied were effective in enhancing their performance. To obtain more explicit conclusions, it is recommended to re run the experiment with a prolonged treatment period.