Where are the Polish Sunday babies? Declining weekend births in the years 1967-2017

PURPOSE: The main objective of the paper was to analyze the weekly seasonality of childbirths in 1967-2017 nationwide, divided by voivodeships and types of gminas (local communities). The relationship between the intensity of births on Sundays and the proportion of childbirths performed by caesarean section was also investigated.DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: The analysis covered 26,060,540 records containing the dates of births in Poland from the PESEL database for 1967-2017. The seasonality of births was presented by means of heat maps, while the Pearson correlation coefficient was used in the analysis of relationships.FINDINGS: Research confirms the increasing proportion of deliveries carried out by the cesarean section in the majority of countries worldwide. However, Poland is one of the countries where the prevalence of cesarean sections is the highest in the world. According to WHO, the percentage of cesarean sections should be about 10-15 % of all births, while in 2017 in Poland it amounted to 45%. The empirical study confirmed a marked decline in births on Saturdays and Sundays in Poland.PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: The described trends may adversely affect demographic processes, e.g., they may exacerbate the low fertility rate in Poland.ORIGINALITY/VALUE: The study fills the gap in the international research on the phenomenon by adding results from Poland.The project is co-financed within the framework of the program of the Minister of Science and Higher Education under the name „Regional Excellence Initiative” in the years 2019 – 2022; project number 001/RID/2018/19; the amount of financing PLN 10,684,000.00.peer-reviewe

Teaching in snow sports: professional sport, education, and recreation

Human activity in the field of snow sports is a set of complex psychomotor functions, fitting in an interactive model of variables: ‘organism – world’. The study was an attempt to determine the specific situational dimensions and subjective properties determining the effectiveness of the teaching/learning process in professional, educational (school) and recreational forms of snow sports. Depending on the level of training, important differences in the process for teachers, trainers, and instructors were indicated. Also, some selected psychosocial teaching rules and an efficiency model for snow sports instructor work was discussed

Validation of Sport Anxiety Scale-2 (SAS-2) among Polish athletes and the relationship between anxiety and goal orientation in sport

Abstract This study aims to assess the validity and reliability of the Polish version of the Sport Anxiety Scale-2, as well as to determine the relationship between anxiety and goal orientation among high-performance and recreational athletes. A total of 519 athletes aged M = 22.83 (SD = 4.92) participated in the study, including 266 males and 253 females. 242 athletes trained professionally and 277 recreationally. The Sport Anxiety Scale-2 (SAS-2) was used to assess anxiety levels, while the Task and Ego Orientation in Sport Questionnaire (TEOSQ) and the Perception of Success Questionnaire (POSQ) enabled to assess athletes’ goal orientation. Confirmatory factor analysis showed a good fit of the model to the data for the Polish version of the Sport Anxiety Scale-2 (CFI = 0.945, RMSEA = 0.072). The models obtained during analysis of high-performance and recreational athletes, women and men, also presented a satisfactory fit to the data (CFI 0.932–0.946). The configural, metric, scalar and strict measurement invariances were demonstrated for high-performance and recreational athletes as well as among women and men. High internal consistency coefficients (alpha 0.81–0.91) and a high test–retest reliability indexes were reported (ICC 0.74–0.87). Women presented higher level of competitive anxiety than men. A positive relationship between competitive anxiety and athletes’ ego orientation was also presented. This relationship concerned particularly women practicing sport recreationally