Establishment of norms for the Bull‟s Mental Skills Questionnaire in South African university students: An exploratory study

Abstract

In various South African academic and professional fields, such as Sport and Exercise Psychology, mental skills are measured individually and/or collectively using internationally developed scales. Local norms are needed for such measures. The purpose of this study was to establish preliminary South African norms, in the form of means and standard deviations, for one such United Kingdom developed collectively orientated mental skill measure. The Bull"s Mental Skills Questionnaire, consists of seven mental skill subscales: imagery ability (ia), mental preparation (mp), self-confidence (sc), anxiety and worry management (awm), concentration ability (ca), relaxation ability (ra) and motivation (m), which collectively produce a total mental skills score. For the purpose of obtaining a large sample size for this exploratory study, data were collected from 419 male and female university students with a mean age of 20.18 years. Results suggested significant correlations among all subscales, except between imagery ability and anxiety and worry management, as well as significant differences between males and females for imagery ability and motivation. There were no significant differences between ages or between younger and older mean age groups. Results are compared with previous South Africa studies where the scale has been used. Recommendations for future research are made.

Benchmarking Psychosocial Skills Important for Talent Development

“…We also examined several empirically tested assessments of psychosocial skills including (a) Bull's Mental Skills Questionnaire (Edwards & Steyn, ), which consists of seven factors (imagery ability, mental preparation, self‐confidence, anxiety and worry management, concentration ability, relaxation ability, and motivation); (b) the Psychological Characteristics of Developing Excellence Questionnaire (Macnamara & Collins, ), which consists of six factors (support for long‐term success, imagery use during practice and competition, coping with performance and developmental pressure, ability to organize and engage in quality practice, evaluating performances and working on weaknesses, and support from others to compete to my potential); and (c) the Mental Toughness Questionnaire (AQR International, ; Vaughn, Hanna, & Breslin, ), which consists of eight subscales (life control, emotional control, goal setting, achieving, preparation to accept risk, learning from experience, confidence in abilities, and interpersonal confidence).…”

Mental skills in Serbian handball players: In relation to the position and gender of players

“…One of the questionnaires that found its practical and empirical use in sport is Bull’s Mental Skills Questionnaire ( Bull et al, 1996 ), which was developed in the United Kingdom to measure imagery ability (IA), mental preparation (MP), self-confidence (SC), anxiety and worry management (AWM), concentration ability (CA), relaxation ability (RA), and motivation (M) ( Bull et al, 1996 ). Even though there is a number of tools (questionnaires) that test in some way athlete’s mental skills, Bull’s questionnaire has a more comprehended view of mental skills and has been validated in South Africa and the United Kingdom context ( Edwards and Steyn, 2011 ; Edwards et al, 2011 ; Edwards and Edwards, 2012 ), as well as in Turkey ( Miçooğullari et al, 2021 ). The questionnaire was used in different research questions, such as defining psychosocial skills as important for talent development (exp.…”