Improvement of students’ mental health in a Lai physical education program incorporating psychological scales
Data publikacji: 19 mar 2025
Otrzymano: 27 paź 2024
Przyjęty: 17 lut 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/amns-2025-0496
Słowa kluczowe
© 2025 Jicheng Sun et al., published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The importance of physical education curriculum resources is becoming more and more apparent as the curriculum reform of basic education in China continues to intensify. As such, it constitutes, to a certain extent, a support system for curriculum reform. There are many and various kinds of traditional ethnic sports, which are suitable to be used as resources for developing physical education curricula and promoting ethnic characteristics.
Li is the earliest ethnic group in Hainan, mainly residing in Lingshui, Baoting, Ledong, Dongfang, Changjiang, Baisha, Qiongzhong, Wuzhishan and other counties and cities in Hainan Province, with the rest scattered in Wanning, Danzhou, Tunchang, Qionghai and other counties and cities within Hainan Province, as well as in Guizhou Province and other provinces [1]. The number and scope of sports programs of Li ethnic group are numerous and extensive, and there are four characteristics in terms of their nature and manifestation forms: festival dependence, religious relevance, recreation and entertainment, and ethnic region [2–3]. According to the results of the literature method statistics, Hainan Li sports program is about 47 items, to the physical quality of the dominant ethnic traditional sports item group, mainly refers to the games and entertainment contained in the strength, endurance, sensitivity, hit, speed and comprehensive quality of the contents of the sports program, the amount of activity is large [4]. However, sports can also bring about psychological problems and be affected by psychological problems, so psychological scales are used in sports to assess mental health and help improve psychological problems.
Psychological scales are scientifically designed questionnaires that are used as tools to measure the psychological characteristics of individuals. In sport science, psychometric scales are usually used to assess the mental state, personal ability and adaptability of athletes [5]. Psychological scales in sports science include the Sports Anxiety Questionnaire, Sports Motivation Questionnaire, Sports Confidence Scale, Sports Competition Anxiety Scale, Sports Complementary Beliefs Scale, Sports Life Skills Scale, etc. [6–9]. In the evaluation, not only should we pay attention to the scientific and accuracy of the questionnaires themselves, but we should also take into account the personal characteristics and actual situation of different athletes, so as to carry out the correct interpretation of the questionnaires and score reports.
This paper is oriented to the study of the improvement of mental health by the physical education program of the Lai people, which consists of three main parts. In the first part, through the empirical investigation of physical education curriculum activities, the effects of physical education curriculum and mental health were analyzed by using regression models, and the mediating effects of physical education curriculum, coping styles, mental resilience, and mental health were explored from. In the second part, through the in-depth study of mental health and physical education courses, a mental health scale consisting of five parts, including happiness in life, willingness to learn, interpersonal harmony, test composure and emotional stability, was constructed. And the feasibility and validity of the psychological scale is verified through the reliability and validity test. In the third part, based on the psychological scale, a study was conducted on the impact of the Li sports program on mental health, and the results of the study showed that the Li sports program had a significant improvement effect on learning mental health.
It has been mentioned that the duration and intensity of physical exercise are significantly related to mental health and there is a dose relationship between lack of exercise, mental ill-health, and suicide self-harm attempts [10]. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to the mental health of students. In athletes, psychological scales are important indicators to assess mental health. Literature [11] mentions that the Injury-Psychological Readiness to Return to Sport (I-PRRS) scale and the Sport Confidence Inventory (SCI) can assess the psychological readiness of athletes. This also applies to physical education students as well. It is always known that most of the minority sports are different, which may be special sports movements, or special sports rules, or special sports tools, etc., which leads to some students’ shyness to show and psychological pressure. Some of them are obsessed with winning in sports and have a perfectionist attitude. For this reason, there is a multidimensional perfectionism scale in sports that assesses multiple dimensions of the student’s factors in order to treat the problem and help the student to improve his/her mental health [12]. Literature [13] also utilized a questionnaire with Likert scale questions and open-ended questions to investigate whether there is validity in the application of interventions for athletes, and the results showed that this questionnaire is credible but also lacks certain correlations between athletes and coaches. After all, the coach is the person who has the most contact between the athletes in addition to the players, which definitely has an impact on their mental health. Therefore, there is still a need to pick the right mental scale to apply to the students in the Lai Physical Education program. In addition, as mentioned before, there is a strength competition in Lai sports, so it is inevitable that students will be injured in the sports program. In this regard, literature [14] utilized four questionnaires, the Injury Report, the College Athletes’ Life Event Coping Scale, the Sports Anxiety Scale, and the Sports Competition Anxiety Test, and found that uninjured athletes had lighter anxiety than injured athletes. The Lai Physical Education program can also refer to the four psychological scales to keep an eye on students’ mental health problems and intervene in a timely manner.
Based on the core view of mental health in the physical education curriculum, physical activity is beneficial in the dynamic interaction between the individual and the environment, and the theoretical discussion of mental health, coping styles, and psychological resilience emphasizes the inseparable link between the individual, behavior, and the environment. Individual coping styles, psychological resilience, psychological well-being and sport are closely related. In order to further investigate the relationship between physical education program activities, coping styles, psychological resilience and mental health. This study intends to set students’ physical education program activities as the independent variable, mental health as the dependent variable, and coping styles and psychological resilience as the mediating variables to investigate the mediating effects of coping styles and psychological resilience in the effects of physical education program activities on mental health.
The survey was conducted by convenience sampling method, and 800 students of University S were selected as the survey object, 800 questionnaires were distributed, 780 questionnaires were effectively recovered after excluding missing and invalid questionnaires, the recovery rate of the questionnaires was 97%, and 769 of the effective questionnaires were returned.
This paper examines the correlations between physical education curricular activities, coping styles, psychological resilience, and psychological well-being and assesses the effects between them through correlation coefficients. In this part, Pearson correlation analysis will be used to explore in depth the correlations among the four variables of physical education curriculum activities (T), coping styles (Y), psychological resilience (XT), and mental health (XJ). In coping styles Yj denotes positive coping styles and Yx denotes negative coping styles, and the results of the correlation analysis are shown in Table 1. Person (two-tailed) correlation analysis examines the correlations among students’ physical education curriculum activities, mental health, coping styles, and psychological resilience. As can be seen from the table, there is a significant two-tailed correlation (P<0.01) for all variables in the survey sample.
Correlation analysis results
| Variable | M | SD | T | Yj | Yx | XT | XJ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| T | 23.40 | 14.10 | 1 | ||||
| Yj | 28.33 | 5.95 | 0.496** | 1 | |||
| Yx | 9.95 | 4.73 | -0.391** | -0.589** | 1 | ||
| XT | 75.42 | 18.13 | 0.437** | 0.785** | -0.573** | 1 | |
| XJ | 173.61 | 36.40 | -0.585** | -0.811** | 0.661** | -0.762** | 1 |
There is a significant positive correlation between physical education program activities and positive coping styles and psychological resilience (r=0.496, r=0.437). There is a significant negative correlation with negative coping styles and psychological well-being (r=-0.391, r=-0.585).
There is a significant positive correlation between positive coping styles and psychological resilience (r=0.785) and a significant negative correlation with negative coping styles and psychological health (r=-0.589, r=-0.811). There is a significant negative correlation between negative coping styles and psychological resilience (r=-0.573) and a significant positive correlation with psychological wellbeing (r=0.661). There was a significant negative correlation between psychological resilience and mental health (r=-0.762).
In summary, the results show that students with higher levels of physical education program activities, positive coping styles and psychological resilience have lower scores on the level of mental health, which is a reflection of having a good level of mental health. It also proves that physical education program activities have a positive impact on the mental health of individuals.
The results of the covariance diagnosis of students’ physical education course activities, coping styles and psychological resilience showed that the conditional coefficients of each variable were less than 30, the VIF was less than 5, and the tolerance level was greater than 0.3, so there was no covariance problem, and the follow-up test could be conducted. The results of regression analysis of physical education curriculum activities, coping styles, psychological resilience and mental health are shown in Table 2. The table shows that the whole regression equation is significant (R2=0.759, F=244.032, p<0.001). The regression analysis showed that physical education curriculum activities significantly negatively predicted mental health (
Regression analysis
| Regression equation | Integral fitting index | Standard regression coefficient | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Result variable | Predictor variable | R2 | Adjust R2 | F | T | |
| XJ | Grade | 0.353 | 0.354 | 70.541 | -0.081 | -2.443* |
| Biotically | 0.040 | 1.235 | ||||
| Only child | 0.049 | 1.501 | ||||
| Majors | -0.052 | -1.602 | ||||
| T | -0.573 | -17.591*** | ||||
| Yj | Grade | 0.257 | 0.250 | 43.530 | 0.085 | 2.548* |
| Biotically | -0.031 | -0.855 | ||||
| Only child | -0.042 | -1.262 | ||||
| Majors | 0.021 | 0.521 | ||||
| T | 0.480 | 13.710*** | ||||
| Yx | Grade | 0.155 | 0.151 | 23.613 | -0.060 | -1.611 |
| Biotically | 0.015 | 0.507 | ||||
| Only child | 0.061 | 1.652 | ||||
| Majors | -0.045 | -1.182 | ||||
| T | -0.375 | -10.045*** | ||||
| XT | Grade | 0.643 | 0.630 | 156.031 | 0.093 | 3.770*** |
| Biotically | -0.020 | -0.771 | ||||
| Only child | 0.030 | 1.299 | ||||
| Majors | -0.021 | -0.800 | ||||
| T | 0.051 | 1.642 | ||||
| Yj | 0.651 | 19.782*** | ||||
| Yx | -0.163 | -5.245*** | ||||
| XJ | Grade | 0.759 | 0.755 | 244.032 | 0.008 | 0.350 |
| Biotically | 0.011 | 0.721 | ||||
| Only child | 0.018 | 0.891 | ||||
| Majors | -0.042 | -1.821 | ||||
| T | -0.211 | -9.101*** | ||||
| Yj | -0.340 | -11.470*** | ||||
| Yx | 0.200 | 7.881*** | ||||
| XT | -0.249 | -7.750*** | ||||
When physical education curricular activities and coping styles together predicted psychological resilience, physical education curricular activities were able to positively predict psychological resilience (
When physical program activities, coping styles, and psychological resilience simultaneously predicted psychological well-being, physical program activities, positive coping styles, and psychological resilience were all able to significantly negatively predict psychological well-being, and negative coping styles were able to significantly positively predict psychological well-being (
The physical education curriculum activities were set as the independent variable, mental health as the dependent variable, and coping styles and psychological resilience as the mediating variables to establish the chain mediation model. Model 6 (Model6), a Process3.5 plug-in in SPSS, was used to analyze the chain mediation effect using the Bootstrap method. The coping style and psychological resilience mediated effect tests are shown in Table 3. Where Ind1 is Physical Education Program Activity → Coping Style → Mental Health, Ind2 is Physical Education Program Activity → Psychological Resilience → Mental Health, and Ind3 is Physical Education Program Activity → Coping Style → Psychological Resilience → Mental Health.
Intermediate effect test
| Benefit type | Effect value | Boot SE | Bootstrap95%CI | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Boot LLCL | Boot ULCL | Relative effect ratio(%) | |||
| Total effect | -0.0142 | 0.0009 | -0.0160 | -0.0132 | 100% |
| Indirect effect | -0.0055 | 0.0006 | -0.0071 | -0.0046 | 38.73% |
| Indirect total effect | -0.0087 | 0.0009 | -0.0105 | -0.0073 | 61.34% |
| Ind1 | -0.0055 | 0.0006 | 0.0072 | -0.0045 | |
| Ind2 | -0.0006 | 0.0004 | -0.0012 | -0.0001 | |
| Ind3 | -0.0031 | 0.0005 | -0.0037 | -0.0020 | |
| (C1)Ind1→Ind2 | -0.0050 | 0.0009 | -0.0062 | 0.0035 | |
| (C2)Ind1→Ind3 | -0.0031 | 0.0009 | -0.0045 | -0.0011 | |
| (C3)Ind2→Ind3 | 0.0022 | 0.0003 | 0.0016 | 0.0030 | |
The table presents the pathways of physical education curriculum activities affecting mental health and their standardized effect values. If the upper and lower limits of the 95% confidence interval do not contain zero, the mediating effect is significant. Conversely, the mediating effect is not significant. The results showed that the total effect of physical education program activities on mental health was -0.0146. The direct effect produced by physical education program activities on mental health was -0.0055, which accounted for 38.73% of the total effect, indicating that the direct effect of physical education program activities on mental health was significant. The total indirect effect produced by coping styles and psychological resilience was -0.0087, and the total indirect effect accounted for 61.34% of the total effect, which indicates that coping styles and psychological resilience play a partially mediating role between physical activity and mental health. Coping styles and psychological resilience showed a significant chain mediating effect between physical education program activities and mental health. This confirms that physical education program activities can directly affect mental health and also have an impact on mental health by influencing individuals’ coping styles and enhancing psychological resilience.
Mental health is hierarchical, and the manifestations of mental health can be broadly categorized into three levels, namely, mental illness or disorder, normal mental functioning and sound personality. Among them, mental diseases or disorders belong to the unhealthy level. Normal mental functioning belongs to the lower level of mental health, also known as “negative mental health”, which is basically characterized by psychological adaptation. Human beings tend to be balanced, but they also seek new stimuli and continuous growth. The tendency to balance and the pursuit of continuous growth reflect both the different levels of personality perfection and the different degrees of initiative in one’s psychological life. Thus, a “positive mental health” personality integrity belongs to this high level of mental health, which is characterized by the pursuit of noble goals and the development of constructive interpersonal relationships. It is characterized by the pursuit of noble goals, the development of constructive interpersonal relationships, the engagement in socially valuable creativity, the desire for life’s challenges, and the search for fulfillment and meaning in one’s life.
An Empirical View of Mental Health First, the concept of mental health is defined as being above the norm, a mental state of authentic pleasure, ability to work and love. Second, the concept of mental health can be derived from positive psychology. Third, mental health implies maturity from the point of view of the development of a healthy adult. Fourth, mental health is being emotionally or socially competent. Fifth, mental health is having subjective well-being, which is a subjective feeling of joy, fulfillment, and hope. Finally, mental health is adaptation, the ability to successfully adapt and maintain equilibrium. Therefore, the scale developed in this study should be able to cover both low and high levels of mental health. This study adopts today’s prevailing view that mental health is defined as not only the absence of mental illness or deviance, but also the ability of an individual to remain well physically, psychologically, as well as socially behaved.
The study selected the students of the Lai Physical Education Program in two schools as the subjects, and administered the test mainly to the class groups, with a total of 1,567 questionnaires, and excluding the invalid questionnaires, a total of 1,553 valid questionnaires were obtained.
KMO test and Bartlett’s spherical test were used to determine whether the data conformed to factor analysis. The results showed that the KMO statistic for testing partial correlation between variables was 0.936, indicating that there was not much difference in the degree of correlation between items.The Bartlett’s spherical test data reached a significant level of 0.000 or more, indicating that there was the possibility of sharing factors between items, which was suitable for factor analysis. The rotated factor loading matrix was found by rotating with the method of great variance. Kaiser method eigenvalue method (eigenvalue > 1) and gravel test were used to determine the number of factors. Reference was also made to the contribution rate and the number of question items included, as retaining male factors with few question items and low contribution rate would result in too many male factors, complicating the structure of the questionnaire and not contributing to the understanding of the original complex structure. The factor analysis gravel plot is shown in Figure 1, from which it can be visualized that the 5 factors’ are located on steep slopes and have eigenvalues greater than 1.
Factor analysis
The factor conformity and commonality of the Mental Health Scale is shown in Table 4, which shows that the contribution of the five factors ranged from 5.01% to 21.48%, and they explained 49.12% of the total variance. The commonality of the question items was in the range of 0.270 to 0.670 and the factors explained the question items well. The factor loadings of the topic items were in the range of 0.451-0.810. Factor 1 consists of six items, mainly related to satisfaction with life and perception of self, and can be named “Happiness in life”. Factor 2 has an item that relates to perceptions of learning, as well as the pleasure, satisfaction and motivation experienced from learning, and could be named “enjoyment of learning”. Factor 3 has five items relating to interpersonal status and the ability to deal with interpersonal relationships and can be named “Interpersonal Harmony”, while Factor 4 has five items relating to test-related stress and anxiety and can be named “Test Calming”. Factor 5 has four items related to emotional stability and control over emotions and can be named “emotional stability”.
The factors of the mental health scale are consistent with the same degree
| Mental health | Eigenvalue | Contribution rate | Issue number | Factor load | Common degree |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Happy life | 5.39 | 21.52% | 38 | 0.710 | 0.592 |
| 37 | 0.681 | 0.513 | |||
| 28 | 0.642 | 0.533 | |||
| 39 | 0.585 | 0.476 | |||
| 19 | 0.583 | 0.442 | |||
| 7 | 0.543 | 0.462 | |||
| Willing to learn | 2.27 | 9.12% | 1 | 0.810 | 0.671 |
| 18 | 0.720 | 0.554 | |||
| 24 | 0.673 | 0.587 | |||
| 54 | 0.670 | 0.510 | |||
| 2 | 0.495 | 0.340 | |||
| Interpersonal harmony | 1.84 | 7.42% | 25 | 0.643 | 0.462 |
| 70 | 0.630 | 0.462 | |||
| 29 | 0.628 | 0.561 | |||
| 56 | 0.617 | 0.420 | |||
| 59 | 0.570 | 0.342 | |||
| Test stabilization | 1.51 | 6.05% | 66 | 0.765 | 0.604 |
| 44 | 0.711 | 0.622 | |||
| 6 | 0.547 | 0.367 | |||
| 60 | 0.542 | 0.375 | |||
| 63 | 0.451 | 0.275 | |||
| Emotional stability | 1.24 | 5.01% | 26 | 0.775 | 0.621 |
| 30 | 0.741 | 0.585 | |||
| 31 | 0.653 | 0.460 | |||
| 43 | 0.612 | 0.411 |
In this study, internal consistency reliability (homogeneity reliability,
The reliability analysis of the psychological scale
| Reliability analysis table | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mental health | Half degree | |||
| Total scale | 0.841 | 0.852 | ||
| Happy life | 0.781 | 0.738 | ||
| Willing to learn | 0.753 | 0.750 | ||
| Interpersonal harmony | 0.655 | 0.611 | ||
| Test stabilization | 0.644 | 0.561 | ||
| Mental health | 0.674 | 0.684 | ||
| The verification factor analysis of the structural model | ||||
| Index | RMSEA | GFI | NNFI | CFI |
| Value | 0.06 | 0.94 | 0.87 | 0.89 |
Teaching reform of physical education curriculum is the inheritance and development of traditional physical education teaching, through which the traditional teaching objectives, teaching contents, teaching methods, teaching evaluation and other aspects are inherited and improved to realize the cultivation of the quality of learning in all aspects. The core of this paper’s research is oriented to the improvement of mental health by physical education courses. For this reason, the psychological scale constructed in this basic paper is used to conduct an empirical study on the improvement of mental health in the physical education program of the Lai people.
On the basis of the survey research, the Li physical education course of H school was selected as the experimental object through the sampling method, and the psychological health scale of this paper was adopted for assessing the recent psychological condition of the subject middle school students, and the experimental period was 3 months. The researcher conducted a pre-test before the experiment to understand the mental health level of the subjects before the experiment, and after the experimental intervention, a post-test was conducted in time at the end of the experiment. After recovering the questionnaires, the researcher firstly eliminated the invalid questionnaires, then scored the questions of the valid questionnaires, and finally processed the statistics. Invalid questionnaires were eliminated and results were recorded according to the requirements of questionnaire testing. Eighty questionnaires were distributed before the experiment and 80 questionnaires were recovered, and the validity rate of the questionnaires was 100%.
The changes in mental health before and after the experiment of the Lai Physical Education course are shown in Table 6, and after the experiment, a t-test was conducted on the mental health of the students in the Lai Physical Education course class before and after the experiment. It was found that the p-values of happiness in life, willingness to learn, interpersonal harmony, exam composure and emotional stability before and after the teaching experiment were 0.005, 0.020, 0.000, 0.012 and 0.015, respectively, and the scores of the dimensions before and after the experiment had extremely significant differences (all p < 0.05). This indicates that all aspects of the students’ mental health were effectively improved through the Lai Physical Education Program thousand prognosis.
The physical and mental health changes before and after the physical education
| Mental health | M | SD | P |
|---|---|---|---|
| Happy life | 0.22015 | 0.4752 | 0.005 |
| Willing to learn | 0.20835 | 0.5301 | 0.020 |
| Interpersonal harmony | 0.15487 | 0.2110 | 0.000 |
| Test stabilization | 0.12831 | 0.2920 | 0.012 |
| Emotional stability | 0.18075 | 0.4121 | 0.015 |
This study examined the impact of physical education program and mental health based on the research results and related theories of physical education program. The results of correlation analysis test showed a significant two-by-two correlation (p<0.01) between physical education program activities, mental health, coping styles, and psychological resilience of real students. On the other hand, physical education program activities produced a direct effect of -0.0055 on mental health and a total indirect effect of -0.0087 on coping styles and mental resilience. 38.73 and 61.34% of the total effect, respectively, verifying the significant direct effect of physical education program activities on mental health as well as the partial mediating role of coping styles and psychological resilience between physical activity and mental health.
This for, in order to explore the improvement of mental health in a scientific and rational way, this paper constructed a mental health scale for physical education courses. The results of the reliability and validity test indicated that the internal consistency coefficient of the total scale was 0.841, the split-half reliability coefficient was 0.852, the RMSEA and GFI values of the model reached the standard of goodness of fit, and the values of the NNFI and the CFI were close to 0.9. It means that the mental health scale in this paper passed the reliability and validity test and meets the requirements, and the psychological scale constructed in this study is valid.
In the mental health improvement impact study, the range of M, SD and P values of happiness in life, willingness to learn, interpersonal harmony, exam composure and emotional stability before and after the teaching experiment were between 0.12 and 0.23, 0.21 and 0.48 and 0.000 and 0.015, respectively, which indicates that the Li physical education program has a significant improvement effect on the students’ mental health.