Analysis On The Self-Determination Motivation Of Marathon Participants

In recent years,urban marathon races have shown a rapid development trend in China.Marathon popularity is actually a manifestation of the group participation triggered by people's instinct for health.As the foothold of the mass sports life,Marathon has helped people realize the lifestyle full of sports,and its athletic connotation has quietly migrated to entertainment,fitness,tourism and other functions.The existing research on marathon mainly focuses on the cultural connotation of sports competition,value realization,the development of sports industry and other aspects,while the research on the participants remains at the level of descriptive analysis of their behavior.In-depth understanding of the driving forces and resistances affecting marathon runners' participation in the race,investigating the horizontal and vertical correlations among runners' autonomous needs,ability needs,and relationship needs,and exploring the main structures and characteristics of self-determination motivations is helpful to understand runners' demand for movement interests,guide competitors to continue to initiate participation,and promote the healthy and benign development of marathon.After combing domestic and foreign theories and research results on marathon participation motivations,this study takes non-professional competitors in the 2019 Chizhou Marathon as the research objects,draws on the framework of the self-determination theory,and assumes that the variables of demographic characteristics have an important impact on the participants' self-determination motivation.Psychological needs scale and behavior regulation scale are used to measure the relationship and mutual influences of participants' self-determination motivation,psychological needs and behavioral performance characteristics.A total of 400 questionnaires were distributed in the survey,and 393 valid questionnaires were recovered.The obtained data was analyzed using SPSS 20.0 and the results were obtained.The motivation intensity of marathon participants is ranked as follows: identity adjustment> internal motivation> external adjustment> introduction adjustment> non-motivation;gender,age,and income level have significant effects on self-determined motivation.The four dimensions of extrinsic adjustment,introversion adjustment,identification adjustment and internal motivation are all significantlycorrelated with the participants' monthly running volume,annual registrations and competition experience and other behavioral variables.The continuous internalization of marathon participants' self-determination motivation is the driving force for the continuous participation behavior mechanism.The positive feedback at the internal environment,such as self-value realization,ability improvement and identity acquisition,and the positive stimulus at the external environment,such as marathon service system,urban landscape construction,cultural popularization and media publicity,will promote the internalization of the participants' motivations.Therefore,this study puts forward three suggestions.First,the organizer of Marathon should pay attention to information feedback,make a timely respond and interact with the participants.Second,participants should tailor game strategies according to their demands.Third,sponsors should make use of their advantages and give scientific guidance to the participants.