Validity evidences of two Sports-Pedagogy-related scales: socio-educational and autonomy development in youth sports

Abstract

Competition is the essence of sports and, when conceived having participants as references, it can contributes to the development of different pedagogical contents, among them, socio-educative aspects and autonomy. The purpose of this research was to demonstrate the first validity evidences of two scales for supporting socio-educational and autonomy development in youth sports; both are part of the Battery of Tests Gonçalves-Balbinotti of Pedagogical Contents’ Development Support in Youth Sports. We aim to estimate their internal structures, test their stabilities and estimate their internal consistency. A sample of 210 coaches answered the scales related to socio-educational and autonomy development, which presented second order two-factor structures with significant factor loadings (> 0.40) and explaining 80.6% and 73.2% of the constructs’ total variance, respectively. The results related to the model fit were satisfactory (X2/df < 2.00; AGFI > 0.95; RMSEA < 0.05; CFI > 0.95; TLI > 0.95). The results regarding the internal consistency (0.786 < α < 0.913 for the factors; αSE = 0.889; αAu = 0.870) assure the precision of the measures and the reliability of their uses according to their purposes. The results answer the main and specific purposes of this research and indicate the safe use of these two scales.