Scale for Sport Enjoyment and Perceived Performance

Sports Enjoyment Scale

This discussion will act as a proposal for a new test within the field of sports psychology. This test, named?The Sports Enjoyment Scale,?will be constructed by combining aspects of two preexisting scales including a sport enjoyment scale and a perceived performance scale. This is important to understand what factors play into the enjoyment of sports within athletes and can be useful to help coaches generate action plays for supporting the enjoyment of their athletes. This is meant to act as a pilot study for a potential new scale in the field of sports psychological research.

Background

????The constructs of sport enjoyment and perceived performance have both been partially studied in past literature separately. Kendzierski and DeCarlo (1991) generate the physical activity enjoyment scale (PACES) to determine if exercise participants were enjoying the activity they were taking part in. One part of this test that seems to be lacking in my opinion is the lack of efforts toward correlating enjoyment to other major constructs in sports. This generated a motivation to look at how perceived performance may play into someone’s enjoyment of the sport they play. This existing scale will be used in the pretest and posttest of this newly generated sport enjoyment scale. One major difference is the post-test will include items related to perceived performance.

????The perceived performance aspect of this posttest was generated using the Athlete’s Subjective Performance Scale (APS) created by Nahum (2016). This 6 items scale will be important for understanding how the athletes think about their performance in the game. The hypothesis here is that a player's positive perception regarding their performance will maintain or increase their sports enjoyment throughout the game that was played. This will be monumental for the sports field because it will give players the ability to understand where their enjoyment of the sport is derived from. On a larger scale, understanding how and why athletes enjoy the sport they play may be crucial when determining whether general managers want them as part of their organization. The classic advice of enjoying what you do for work so you never have to work a day in your life applying to professional baseball as much as the next job; if GMs have the understanding that their potential prospects' enjoyment of their sport is fully dependent on their play, they might be more cautious about sending out money to that athlete.?

Conceptualization

The content of the present study is largely focused on baseball athletes. This study will be very specific to baseball players but can easily be tweaked to apply to other athletes of other sports. Because of the background that I have in the game of baseball, I feel it is important to apply my knowledge and deliver this type of content to promote growth and psychological understanding in, and around the game. The test-users of this study could be an array of individuals within athletics who are interested in athletes' general enjoyment of their sport. For this study specifically, the test-takers or sample will be members of a collegiate baseball team in West Palm Beach, Florida. The type of athletes who can benefit from this type of test can range from youth athletes to professionals. With that said, cultural factors are involved. A large part of the baseball community and culture relies on Spanish as their primary language. One limitation right now is the language barrier that would exist as this scale is fully in English. There may also be some hesitation to be completely truthful when answering due to fear of teammates' and coaches' opinions on an athlete's answers; this may still be an issue even with the confidentiality statement being included. This confidentiality statement, along with directing participants to be truthful, will hopefully reflect the thoughts of the athlete test-takers both accurately and effectively.?

References

Kendzierski, D., & DeCarlo, K. J. (1991).?Physical Activity Enjoyment Scale

(PACES)?[Database record]. APA PsycTests .https://doi.org/10.1037/t33669-000

Nahum, O. (2016).?Athlete’s Subjective Performance Scale (ASPS).

ResearchGate. file:///C:/Users/shpctac100a1/Downloads/asps_english.pdf