Psycho–Pedagogical Intervention Actions to Enhance the Decisions Making Among Young Karateka

Abstract

Karate is a sophisticated and challenging combat sport that emphasizes the depth and complexity of the intricate cognitive processes involved in decision-making (DM) during the performance, which have a significant impact on individual performance when grounded in psycho-pedagogical activities. The objective of this study was to investigate the impact of psycho-pedagogical interventions on DM abilities among young female karatekas in Sri Lanka. A total of 30 female young karatekas with 5-10 years of training experience were recruited by the purposive sampling method in a true experimental research design and randomly assigned to two groups of treatment (TRG, n = 15) and control (CG n = 15). After eight weeks of intervention, DM abilities (Thoroughness, control, hesitancy, social resistance, optimizing, principle, and instinctiveness) were assessed. While Offensive (OA), Defensive (DA), and Counter-attack (CA) skills were evaluated through meticulous observations. Standard descriptive statistics were employed to characterize the study population. The Wilcoxon sign rank test, and a mixed analysis of variance with the Bonferroni post hoc test were used to investigate the interaction, main effects and mean differences. There was statistically significant difference in all the variables (add the significant p value range), except hesitancy and principle in the TRG (p value). The time group interaction (statistical value, p value) and main effects (time and group) were detected through mixed analyses of variance only in OA and DA. There were significant mean differences between the TRG and CG in OA (Statistical value, p value), DA (Statistical value, p value), and DM (Statistical value, p value). However, for hesitancy, time effect, and group effect, substantial differences were observed (p > 0.05). The results suggested that hesitancy may be significantly affected by the intervention regarding time or group differences. It could be concluded that the transformative power of psychopedagogical intervention actions effectively enhances the DM process of karatekas during the karate contest.