Swimming, competence, and personality change.

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This study was designed to show that increasing competence in one's environment leads to enhancement of self-esteem. Using pretest and posttest measures of the discrepancy between the ideal self and self-concept of 65 boys between 7 and 15 years old at a YMCA summer camp, it was found that success in learning to swim reduced the discrepancy significantly (/> < .05). Subjects who did not learn to swim, and controls who could already swim and were matched to experimental subjects in age and socioeconomic status, did not experience significant changes in the idcal-self-self-concept discrepancies in either direction. The self-concept has been a topic of study and conjecture since antiquity. Its development and functioning are central concerns of theorists and clinicians throughout psychology, and indeed, the last 2 decades have seen a resurgence of interest in personality theories pertaining to the self-concept. The present study was designed to investigate personality changes which may occur as a result of an individual's increasing competence in his environment. At various points, efficacy in dealing with one's environment has been thought to play a central role in determining the selfconcept, but few investigators have attempted to experimentally examine the links which may be forged between development of competence in a specific area and its personality correlates. Using the self-concept paradigm, personality change was explored in the context of learning to swim. The primary function of the present study was to test the general hypothesis that newly developed competence in a specific area, swimming in this case, would create changes in