PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Burnik, Stojan
AU  - Jug, Snežana
AU  - Kajtna, Tanja
TI  - Sensation seeking in Slovenian female and male mountain climbers
DP  - 2008 Jun 1
TA  - Acta Universitatis Palackianae Olomucensis. Gymnica
PG  - 15--19
VI  - 38
IP  - 3
IS  - 23364912
AB  - Our paper focuses on differences in sensation seeking between male and female athletes who engage in high risk  sports. There are several studies (Cox, 1994; Tušak & Tušak, 2001; Erjavec, 2002), which indicate that male and  female athletes are more similar than males and females in the general population, female athletes thus show more  "traditionally male" characteristics. These studies mainly focus on personality, anxiety and aggression; we wanted to  address these issues in the area of sensation seeking. Sensation seeking has been well researched in the area of high  risk sports - males seem to have higher sensation seeking needs, but gender diff erences in high risk sports have been  quite poorly investigated. Of 33 mountain climbers who participated in our research, 15 of them were male and 18  female and diff erences in age were not signifi cant. We used Zuckerman's Sensation seeking scale IV, which examines  sensation seeking in terms of 5 factors - a general factor, factors of adventure and risk taking, an experience seeking  factor, a disinhibition factor and a boredom susceptibility factor. There were no diff erences found between male and  female mountain climbers, except for a tendency toward statistical signifi cance in the factor of disinhibition, which is  consistent with some previous research. We conclude that male and female mountain climbers in Slovenia are equal  in sensation seeking needs and can be treated as a homogenous sample.