Validating the Youth Sport Enjoyment Construct in High School Physical Education

Abstract

The present study was undertaken to develop and validate a questionnaire measuring teaching processes related to physical education (PE) enjoyment. Scanlan and Lewthwaite's (1986) youth sport enjoyment model provided the theoretical foundation for this work. Content validity and item readability of the instrument were established by obtaining feedback from eight experts in psychology and four highly experienced secondary school teachers. Construct validity was then established by conducting exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses on data from 304 secondary school students (grades 8, 9, and 10). As a result of these analyses, six teaching processes related to PE enjoyment were identified: self-referent competency (four items), other-referent competency (four items), teacher-generated excitement (three items), activity-generated excitement (five items), peer interaction (two items), and parental encouragement (two items). Correlation analyses revealed that all of these processes were positively correlated with PE enjoyment. The weakest correlation was between peer interaction and enjoyment (r = .31, p < .05), and the strongest was between activity-generated excitement and enjoyment (r = .83, p < .05). We believe that the instrument is appropriate for studying affective outcomes within physical educational settings among students in grades 8, 9, and 10.