The Personal and Interpersonal Components of Perfectionism: The Italian Validation of "Multidimensional Inventory of Perfectionism in Sport".

Alessandra De Maria,Caterina Lombardo,Luca Mallia,Mariacarolina Vacca,Arnaldo Zelli

doi:10.3390/ijerph18052657

Abstract

The present research focused on the general theme of perfectionism in the sport domain, and it provided the first empirical validation of the original 72-item “Multidimensional Inventory of Perfectionism in Sport” (MIPS) among Italian athletes. The study, specifically, also focused on the relations linking personal and interpersonal components of perfectionism to athletes’ competitive anxiety. The research overall relied on data from 644 Italian sport science students and professional athletes and included both cross-sectional and longitudinal designs. Data analyses primarily focused on structural equation modeling, and the findings overall supported the psychometric and construct validity of the Italian version of the MIPS, also highlighting the key role of the personal components of perfectionism.

Highlights

The notion of one-dimensional perfectionism has occasionally been resisted until recent times [7] even though, as a whole, most of the current perfectionism research seems to have firmly converged on the alternative notion that perfectionism is a multidimensional construct
With respect to anxiety, which was measured at the latest assessment point, the analyses examined its longitudinal correlations with the Multidimensional Inventory of Perfectionism in Sport (MIPS)
The results showed an unsatisfactory fit (CFI and Tucker–Lewis index (TLI) < 0.90) for exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) models with seven and eight factors (Models 1 and 2)

Summary

Introduction

Scientific attention to the construct of perfectionism has a long history, especially in the field of personality research, and perfectionism tends to be viewed as a relatively stable characteristic that can influence behavior in several areas of daily life and experiences, such as, for instance, sport [1].Despite these well-established general views, scientific literature on perfectionism has been and still is debating some basic issues about the construct, ranging from whether it represents a personality trait or a disposition to which life experiences contribute to its development [2,3].One issue that scholars have animatedly debated over the decades has to do with the dimensionality of perfectionism, and this issue has been of interest to clinicians as well as personality and developmental psychologists. Scientific attention to the construct of perfectionism has a long history, especially in the field of personality research, and perfectionism tends to be viewed as a relatively stable characteristic that can influence behavior in several areas of daily life and experiences, such as, for instance, sport [1]. Despite these well-established general views, scientific literature on perfectionism has been and still is debating some basic issues about the construct, ranging from whether it represents a personality trait or a disposition to which life experiences contribute to its development [2,3]. This definition captures the core idea embedded in early efforts [9] posing that one’s tendency to perfectionism may influence personal and

Methods

Results

Conclusion