Re-Applying the Basic Psychological Needs in Exercise Scale to Various Portuguese Exercise Groups: An Analysis of Bifactor Models and Contextual Invariance

Abstract

This research explored the nature of basic psychological needs in physical activity settings by applying relatively advanced methodological procedures for psychometric assessment. We first re-examined the Basic Psychological Needs in Exercise Scale (BPNES) by reviewing its applicability for physical activity domains among Portuguese respondents. We demonstrated the use of Bifactor Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling (ESEM) and discussed the practical implications of these models. Next, we tested contextual measurement invariance in order to examine needs universality. Our participants were gym exercisers (n = 1935), physical education students (n = 1449), and athletes (n = 1631), all of whom completed the adapted and validated version of the scale in their respective practice physical activity domains. All models under analysis displayed acceptable to excellent fit; the bifactor ESEM model displayed the best fit. We conducted ancillary bifactor measures to assess scale dimensionality and found that the BPNES is best interpreted as a multidimensional instrument. Through testing for multigroup analysis, the bifactor ESEM did not show contextual invariance. In conclusion, the BPNES should be predominantly used as a multidimensional instrument when assessing basic needs in separate physical activity domains. Basic psychological needs are perceived differently between seemingly similar physical activity contexts. Researchers should measure basic needs as a global factor and use context validated sub-scales.

Bifactor exploratory structural equation modeling: A meta-analytic review of model fit

“…The second domain of motivation and emotion includes the constructs academic motivation (Litalien et al, 2017 ; Guay and Bureau, 2018 ; Gordeeva et al, 2020 ; Howard et al, 2020 ; Kartal, 2020 ; Guay et al, 2021 ; Dierendonck et al, 2022 ), sport motivation (Appleton et al, 2016 ; Milton et al, 2018 ; Stenling et al, 2018 ; Cece et al, 2019 ; Méndez-Giménez et al, 2020 ; Rodrigues et al, 2020 ), work motivation (Burk and Wiese, 2018 ; Calkins, 2018 ; Howard et al, 2018 , 2020 , 2021 ; Gegenfurtner and Quesada-Pallarès, 2022 ), job satisfaction (Sutherland, 2020 ), affective commitment (Perreira et al, 2018 ), work engagement (Gillet et al, 2019 ; Huyghebaert-Zouaghi et al, 2021a , 2022 ), teacher engagement (Perera et al, 2018b ), student engagement (Hoi and Hang, 2021 ; Dierendonck et al, 2022 ; Tomás et al, 2022 ), basic psychological needs (Stenling et al, 2015 ; Sánchez-Oliva et al, 2017 ; Tóth-Király et al, 2018 , 2019 ; Bhavsar et al, 2019 , 2020 ; Garn et al, 2019 ; Burgueño et al, 2020a , b ; Cromhout, 2020 ; Gillet et al, 2020 ; Gucciardi et al, 2020 ; Huyghebaert-Zouaghi et al, 2021b ; Rodrigues et al, 2021 ), subjective task value (Fadda et al, 2020b ; Part et al, 2020 ), flow (Kyriazos et al, 2018b ; Gu et al, 2020 ), interest (Garn, 2017 ), locus of causality (Howard et al, 2020 ), attitudes (Deemer et al, 2014 ), purpose (Summers and Falco, 2020 ), self-efficacy (Barbaranelli et al, 2018 ; Dominguez-Lara et al,…”