General health orientation based psychological motivations for masters athletes, a consideration of clustering utilizing t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding

Dr. Joe Walsh is with Sport Science Institute www.sportscienceinstitute.com Ian Timothy Heazlewood is Associate Professor and Theme Leader Exercise and Sport Science in The School of Psychological and Clinical Sciences, Faculty of Engineering, Health, Science and the Environment, Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia. Dr. Mike Climstein (FASMF, FACSM, FAAESS) is with Clinical Exercise Physiology, Southern Cross University, School of Health and Human Sciences, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia; Physical Activity, Lifestyle, Ageing and Wellbeing Faculty Research Group, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia, 2006. An exploration of clustering of general health orientation psychological motivations for participation in sport was conducted using t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE). The aim of this research was to assess the suitability of applying t-SNE to creating two-dimensional scatter plots to visualise the relationship between different general health orientation motivators. The data source used for this investigation was survey data gathered on World Masters Games competitors using the Motivations of Marathoners Scales (MOMS). Application of t-SNE plots could assist in visually mapping general health orientation psychological constructs and gaining greater understanding of the underlying patterns in the MOMS tool.