Group cohesion reworded: measuring group cohesion perceptions in sport

Abstract

Group cohesion in sport is often measured via questionnaires that have been created based on the Group Environment Questionnaire (GEQ; Carron, Widmeyer, & Brawley, 1985, Journal of Sport Psychology, 7,244–266). Still, when assessing the items of these questionnaires more closely, it is evident that several items are not congruent with the theoretical definition of group cohesion. The aim of the current study was thus to reword those items within the German questionnaire KIT-L (Ohlert, 2002, International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 10(1),39–51) and test the new wordings for reliability and validity. Two surveys were conducted to examine the internal consistency as well as the concurrent and discriminant validity of the reworded items compared with the original items. Team satisfaction, performance, social integration and team trust were included as external validity criteria. Reliability analyses and confirmatory factory analysis showed that the new items possess adequate internal validity and model fit. The concurrent validity analysis revealed mostly medium-sized correlations with team satisfaction and performance. The discriminant validity analysis showed that the new instrument clearly distinguishes from behavioural concepts like social integration. Thus, the newly constructed questionnaire KIT-L2 is a valid instrument to measure group cohesion in sport that corresponds with the underlying theory.