Relationships between selected issues perceived by Special Olympic coaches and their selected characteristics and reported coaching style

Relationships between perceptions held by Special Olympics coaches toward issues of Normalization, Mainstreaming versus Segregation, Priority of Training, and Competition involving the Special Olympics program and selected characteristics of coaches and their coaching methods were studied.;A coaches' profile was developed and a model was compiled from background information. Variables considered were gender, years of experience, level of certification, voluntary or compensated status, training ratio of coach to athlete, type of training facility used, and type of reinforcement used.;Levels of agreement or disagreement with selected statements representing the issues were determined for each of the hypotheses. The Chi-Square Two Way Test for Association statistic was used to identify areas of significance regarding the perceptions of coaches through a Likert scale questionnaire.;Findings indicated statistically significant differences of perceptions in eight of 28 tests of the null hypotheses. Normalization revealed years of experience and type of facility used during training to be significantly different. Mainstreaming versus segregation resulted in no significant differences in coaches perceptions of this issue. Priority of training revealed that respondents using ratios of one coach to 11 athletes during training, and type of facility used during training were significantly different. Competition resulted in four significantly different hypotheses. These were gender, certification level, ratio of coach to athlete, and type of facility used during training.;The following conclusions reached were (1) some coaches are unclear about Special Olympics being instrumental in fulfilling a normalizing role for athletes. (2) Special Olympics is perceived to be an appropriate vehicle for mainstreaming athletes with developmental disabilities. (3) Coaches using high ratios, and residential institutions for training perceive that priority of training for sports skills is generalizable to daily living skills. (4) The majority of coaches responding to this study were females, therefore, most coaches who perceive competition to be a valid claim of critics were "head coaches", used ratios of 1:1 to 4 during training, and used a community based facility for training. (5) An overwhelming majority of coaches use non-tangible forms of reinforcements with the athletes.