This study set out to investigate dance majors' flow experience according to gender, career, and technique level and analyze the influences of their flow experience on their performance satisfaction, thus providing useful data for the improvement of d...
This study set out to investigate dance majors' flow experience according to gender, career, and technique level and analyze the influences of their flow experience on their performance satisfaction, thus providing useful data for the improvement of dance majors' flow and dance satisfaction.
In an attempt to analyze the impacts of dance majors' flow experience on their performance satisfaction, the investigator drew up a questionnaire asking about dance majors' personal characteristics, flow experience and performance satisfaction and distributed it to 300 students studying Korean dance, ballet, or modern dance at a four-year college or graduate school in 2008. The questionnaire was comprised of three major sections, which respectively concerned personal characteristics, flow experience, and performance satisfaction. The section of personal characteristics contained eight items about gender, age, dance career, educational background, major, number of performance on the stage, awards, and main position. Employed to measure dance majors' flow experience was the Flow State Scale developed by Jackson & Marsh(1996) based on the factors of flow experience by Csikszentmihalyi(1990, 1993). The Flow State Scale consisted of nine subfactors, which were challenge-skill, action-awareness, clear goals, unambiguous feedback, concentration, sense of control, loss of self-consciousness, transformation of time, and internal reward.
The section of flow experience included total 36 items with four items for each of the nine subfactors. The section of performance satisfaction had three subfactors of contribution of public good, social recognition, and personal achievement used in Francise(1982), Lee Jong-hye(2001), Yu Gyu-bong(2002), and Lee Yang-chul(2003), totaling 14 items. A 5-point Likert scale was used with one point for never, three for average, and five for very much so.
Cronbach's Alpha coefficient was obtained to test item internal consistency and thus to measure reliability. And exploratory factor analysis was conducted to the Flow State Scale that was tested in previous studies(e.g. Jackson & March, 1996) in order to test its validity before distributing the questionnaire.
After collecting the questionnaires and eliminating the ones whose answers were insincere or missed, I used total 278 questionnaires for final analysis with SPSS Ver. 13.0.
Those research procedures led to the following results:
First, the differences in flow experience among the surveyed dance majors were examined according to their personal characteristics. As a result, those who were in their thirties showed a higher degree of flow than those who in their twenties, and those who had a career of 16 years or longer also showed a higher degree of flow experience than those who had a shorter career. Although there were small differences in the order among those who were attending college, graduated from college, and were attending a graduate school according to the subvariables of flow experience, the overall degree of flow experience was the highest among those who graduated from college, who were followed by those who were attending college and those who were attending a graduate school. As for the majors, the Korean dance majors showed the highest degree of flow experience being followed by the ballet and modern dance majors in the order. Those who performed on the stage twice or more engaged in more flow experience than those who didn't, and those who received awards in dance contests also did than those who didn't. Finally, those who had the leading parts showed the highest degree of flow experience.
And secondly, the impacts of the dancers' flow experience on performance satisfaction were reviewed. As a result, the greater internal reward was and the less loss of self-consciousness was, the higher their performance satisfaction was. That is, they were highly satisfied with their performances when dance activities themselves became the goal regardless of external rewards and when their personal self-consciousness became one with the environment. It was also investigated if there were correlations between flow experience and the subvariables of performance satisfaction, which were contribution of public good, personal achievement, and social recognition. The results indicate that the greater internal reward the dancers had, the bigger contribution of public good was. The greater internal reward and feedback were and the less loss of self-consciousness was, the greater personal achievement was. And the greater internal reward was and the less loss of self-consciousness was, the bigger social recognition was.
The research findings reveal that there are differences in the flow experience of dance majors according to their personal characteristics and that their performance satisfaction depends on the various variables of flow experience.