Offered Alternative - Poster Presentation International Positive Psychology Association 8th IPPA World Congress 2023

Introducing two new mental fitness, resiliency, and positive leadership questionnaires for sports teams (#719)

Robert Laurie 1 , Viviane Yvette Bolanos Gramajo 1 , Jodi A Burns 2 , Elizabeth Sloat 1 , William Morrison 1
  1. University of New Brunswick, Faculty of Education, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada
  2. Faculty of the Division of Management and Education, University of Pittsburgh Bradford, Bradford, PA, USA

Background

Sports psychologists and teams consistently strive to improve and reach their goals. Employing positive mental health strategies is increasingly common among competitive sports teams. Sports teams and workplace environments share many common cultural and environmental characteristics. Given those similarities, we developed two new questionnaires to be used with sports teams based on the Positive Workplace Framework (PWF) developed and validated by Canadian researchers Peterson and Morrison (2016). The PWF is comprised of three major domains: mental fitness, resiliency, and positive leadership. 

Aims

Our presentation purpose is to introduce the Sports Mental Fitness and Resiliency Inventory (MFRI-S) and the Positive Leadership Inventory (PLI-S). However, before suggesting their widespread use, each questionnaire must be validated.

Two research questions guided our validation study: 1. How well does each questionnaire’s theoretical model fit the data? 2. What is the internal consistency of each questionnaire?

Method

To answer the research questions, a purposive sample consisting of 192 participants from 14 competitive sports teams (6 women, 8 men) was obtained from a northeastern American College and the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League during the 2021-2022 season/school year. Each team member agreed to participate in the validation study by completing both online questionnaires.

The first research question was answered by performing confirmatory factor analysis and interpreting 4 goodness of fit indices: RMSEA, SRMR, CLI and TLI. The second research question was answered by interpreting McDonald’s omega. 

Results

Results indicate that the MFRI-S and PLI-S theoretical models fit the data well and that both questionnaires had excellent reliability (internal consistency).

Conclusion

We conclude that the MFRI-S and PLI-S can be used with confidence by sports psychologists and sports teams who wish to identify and improve team mental fitness, resiliency, and positive leadership practices thus providing them with a competitive advantage over their opponents.

  1. Peterson, P. and Morrison, W. (2016), The Positive Workplace Framework, Government of New Brunswick.
  • Please select up to 3 keywords from the following list to best describe your submission content: Interdisciplinarity, Relationships, Sport and Fitness