General health orientation based psychological motivations for masters athletes

This paper delves into the psychological motivations behind master athletes' commitment to their sport. It employs advanced data analysis techniques like t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding to cluster and identify various factors affecting this unique demographic, particularly focusing on health orientation.

The research aimed to explore the suitability of using t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) for visualizing general health orientation motivations for participating in sports. Using survey data from World Masters Games competitors and the Motivations of Marathoners Scales (MOMS), the study applied t-SNE to create two-dimensional scatter plots. The plots helped in visually mapping psychological constructs related to health-oriented motivations. Clustering patterns in the plots were largely in line with the original MOMS framework. Interestingly, the study found that t-SNE could effectively represent data even with learning rates outside the commonly recommended ranges. The research suggests that t-SNE can be useful for generating hypotheses about relationships in high-dimensional psychological data.

The full research paper is open access and can be read in the scientific journal The Sport Journal here