Development and factorial validity of the Psychological Skills Inventory for Sports, Youth Version - Short Form:...

Researchers in sport often try to investigate relations between athletes' psychological skills and their sports results to predict top athletic achievements or unexpectedly poor performances. The Psychology Skills Inventory for Sports (Youth version), PSIS-Y, was developed to measure psychological characteristics of young athletes-differentiating well more talented and less talented young athletes. Nevertheless, previous studies revealed its inadequate, factorial validity. Thus, the aim of this study was to develop and investigate the psychometric proprieties of a brief version of the PSIS-Y (PSIS-Y-SF) in a sample of young Croatian athletes. Participants (n = 304; 188 females and 116 male) were recruited in clubs/teams all over Croatia and all of them competed in the Croatian Championship in youth (n = 157) and junior category (n = 147). The PSIS-Y-SF was derived by ten expert psychologists with five of them who had past experiences of agonistic sport practice. Psychometric analysis included Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), internal consistency analysis (Raykov's Maximal Reliability), and correlation between subscales. Moreover, Multivariate Analyses of Variance (MANOVA) was run to test statistical differences between the players' categories (male youth vs. male junior vs. female youth vs. female junior) in all of the subscales. Results of the CFA suggested the adequateness of the supposed six first-order factor solution for the PSIS-Y-SF. The Maximal Reliability statistics suggest a good internal consistency for all of the subscales and the MANOVA suggested differences between the player's categories. The PSIS-Y-SF resulted to be a valid and reliable tool for the assessment of sports psychological skills. Findings from the psychometric evaluation of PSIS-Y-SF suggest that this is a useful tool, which may further assist in the measurement and conceptualization of sport psychological skills.