Rural athletes awareness and utilisation of physiotherapy services survey

The Mann–Whitney U (MW) test was employed to compare two independent groups for these ordinal variables. Variables with non-ordered nominal response options, Chi-square and Fisher’s tests were used. The Chi-square test was used to assess the associations between demographics and categorical variables.

If any expected cell counts in the contingency tables were below five, Fisher’s Exact test was used, as it delivers a more precise estimate under such circumstances. To test for normality of continuous variables, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk tests were used, and none of the continuous variables were found to be normally distributed; accordingly, nonparametric Spearman correlations were employed. For both the MW and Spearman tests, the median (Mdn) and interquartile range (IQR) were reported alongside the mean (M) and standard deviation (SD) as these tests are nonparametric and, in these cases, the Mdn and IQR are more appropriate than the M and SD.

For all inferential tests, statistical significance was defined as p < 0.05.</p>