Less time, better quality. Shortening questionnaires to assess team environment and goal orientation

When assessing team environments in youth sport, participants often spend substantial time responding to lots of items in questionnaires, causing a lack of efficiency (i.e. time and effort) and a decrease of data quality. The purpose of this work was to create short-forms of the questionnaires PeerMCYSQ, SCQPeer, TEOSQ, and also to analyse the existing short-form of the SCQCoach. In Study 1 we developed the short-forms of the instruments. We shortened the questionnaires by using both theory driven and data-driven criteria. In Study 2, we used also qualitative and quantitative data with the aim of validating the short-forms. Finally, in Study 3 we tested the last version of the short-forms and sought evidences concerning their criterion validity. The results showed evidence that supports the psychometric merit of these short-forms: (a) significantly less missing values were obtained; (b) all the factors obtained alpha values above .70; (c) confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that the short-forms fitted the hypothesized models well; (d) correlations between variables were coherent with expectations, and (e) structural equation modeling results showed significant paths consistent with previous literature. On average, our participants only spent a third of the time used to complete the original questionnaires.