New Specific Kinesthetic Differentiation Tests for Female Volleyball Players: Reliability, Discriminative Ability, and Usefulness.

Abstract

This study aimed to determine the test-retest reliability and discriminative ability of five sport-specific kinesthetic differentiation ability tests in female volleyball players. The sample of participants consisted of 98 female volleyball players aged 15.20 ± 1 years from six clubs in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Kinesthetic differentiation ability was determined by the overhead passing test, forearm passing test, float service with a net test, float service without a net test, and float service 6 m from the net test. To estimate test-retest reliability, a sub-sample of 13 players performed all tests on two testing occasions. Furthermore, the discriminative ability of the tests was determined by analyzing the performance between players of different playing positions and situational performances. Parameters of the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) were excellent (0.87-0.78) in all tests except for the float service with the net test, whose reliability was good (0.66). For the absolute reliability estimates, the SEM was higher than SWC (0.2) for all variables except the float service 6 m from the net test, and the SEM was lower than SWC (0.6, 1.2). One-way ANOVA detected no statistically significant inter-positional differences in all five tests (p > 0.05). A significant difference was found between less and more successful players (p < 0.01) for all applied tests. The results of this study show that a specific battery test is a reliable and valid measure and can be used to monitor kinesthetic differentiation ability in young female volleyball players.