TESTS OF THE SPORT COMMITMENT MODEL IN A FEMALE COLLEGE SAMPLE

Abstract

691 The purpose of this research was to conduct tests of a revised version of the Sport Commitment Model in a female college sample. The Sport Commitment Model (SCM: Scanlan et al., 1993) proposes that commitment is determined by sport enjoyment, involvement alternatives, personal investments, social constraints, and involvement opportunities. For the present investigation the SCM, originally validated using child and adolescent samples, was revised to include the construct of financial constraints. It was expected that greater sport enjoyment, personal investment, involvement opportunities, social constraints, financial constraints, and less attractive involvement alternatives would lead to greater levels of sport commitment. Participants were 85 female volleyball players (age 18-24) from Division II schools participating in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference. Participants completed a 38-item questionnaire mid-season during a normal practice session. Exploratory Factor Analyses on the six sub-scales indicated that the questionnaire items loaded on their respective factors (with the exception of the involvement alternatives scale which omitted from subsequent analyses) and formed reliable scales (Coefficient Alpha ranged from.95 to.54). Zero-order correlations revealed that two of the four predictors, sport enjoyment and personal investments, were significantly related to sport commitment as hypothesized (renjoy=.78 and rpin=.34 p ≤.05). Stepwise multiple regression analysis found that sport enjoyment and personal investment were the dominant predictors of commitment accounting for 62% of the variance in sport commitment [F(2,82) = 67.74, p ≤.05]. These findings suggest the following: (1) similar to younger samples, the strongest antecedent of sport commitment is sport enjoyment, and (2) the SCM is applicable to and produces similar results in a college sample.