Asian Journal of Education and Training

This study investigated the important predictors of depression levels of middle school students' according to their recreational sport participation, gender, age and their socioeconomic status. The data's of the study collected from middle schools in the city center of Kutahya, 342 (113 woman, 198 man) students randomly recruited and voluntarily participate to the study, age range 11-15. The easy sampling method was preferred in the present study. As a data collection tool "Depression Scale for Kids" was used improved by Kovacs (1985) and adapted to Turkish by Öy (1991). In the evaluation of data first skewness and kurtosis values were evaluated and no skewness or kurtosis issues were found. Than reliability of the scale was assessed via Cronbach's alpha method and Cronbach's alpha calculated as .657. Lastly for definition of the data's Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis test used. Data analyses were conducted using SPSS version 21. For Windows. As a result there were not any significant difference between gender, age, sport involvement and depression level of the students (p>0, 05). But, there were a significant difference between socioeconomic status and depression level of the students (p<0, 05). The difference was between bad income and very good income.