Open Collections

A psychometric analysis of the Simon and Smoll children’s attitude toward physical activity inventory

University of British Columbia

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the psychometric properties of the Simon and Smoll (1974) semantic differential scale for assessing children's attitude toward physical activity (CATPA) inventory, in light of the attitude-behavior discrepancy controversy. Data analysis was composed of two parts. , Data analysis Part I examined the internal consistency, item discriminating power, item frequency of the neutral/uncertain response, and factor structure of CATPA field test data collected from 2,035 male and female subjects aged 10-15 years. Results of data analysis Part I revealed high internal consistency for each of the six CATPA subdomains, which compared favorably to other investigations. Consistently lower item discriminating power for the word pairs steady-nervous and dirty-clean under each inventory subdomain was found, although all word pairs were judged to be statistically adequate discriminators. Analysis of the neutral/uncertain response frequency showed consistently higher frequency of this response for the bitter-sweet word pair over all subdomains. Factor analysis confirmed the six-factor structure employed by Simon and Smoll (1974); however, the health factor yielded high loadings on only six of eight word pairs, indicating a dichotomous response to this factor. In order to determine if maximizing the psychometric properties of the CATPA inventory would increase the power of the inventory to detect an attitude-behavior relationship, data analysis Part II compared canonical correlation analysis performed on three related data sets. Each data set consisted of one of a priori CATPA data, CATPA data revised according to the results of data analysis Part I, or CATPA factor scores; and behavioral data. The restructured and factor score CAT PA data sets showed no significant improvement in canonical correlations over the a priori CATPA data, indicating that for the measures employed, maximizing the psychometric properties of the CATPA inventory did not improve detection of an attitude-behavior relationship. Based upon the results of data analysis Part I and Part II, it was concluded that the Simon and Smoll CATPA inventory is a psychometrically sound instrument for measuring children's attitude toward the domain of physical activity. However, it was recommended that the word pairs bitter-sweet, dirty-clean, and steady-nervous be deleted from the inventory and that further research be initiated regarding the structure of the inventory and the attitude-behavior relationship.

Text

2010-03-06

For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use.

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/21605

Physical Education

University of British Columbia

Graduate