Development of Sport Motivation Scale for College Athletes

The purpose of this study was to extend the existed sport motivation study (Lin & Chi, 2003) and adopted Deci and Ryan (1985, 1990) self-determination theory to develop a suitable sport motivation scale for college athletes. In this study, 1,603 college athletes were participated and completed in three stages. The first study (n=378) was to develop a questionnaire manuscript and examine items analysis, factor structure and internal consistency. The second study (n=393) used confirm factor analysis to confirm the factor structure and examine criterion-related validity, convergent validity, discriminant validity, composite reliability and average variance extracted. The third study with 832 participants was to examine the measurement equivalence. Results showed that the newly developed 22-item sport motivation scale indicated with 6 factors, including intrinsic motivation, integrated regulation, identified regulation, interjected regulation, external regulation and a motivation. Further, we adopted recent literature and combined integrated regulation and identified regulation into a new dimension entitled ＂autonomous extrinsic motivation＂ as second-order factor; and combined external regulation and interjected regulation into a new dimension entitled ＂controlled extrinsic motivation＂ as another second-order factor. Through the alternative model comparisons, the measurement equivalence indicated that our scale provides good reliability and validity. We concluded that our sport motivation scale has proved to be suitable for assessing the athlete motivation.