Italian Version of the Task and Ego Orientation in Sport Questionnaire

Abstract

The 1992 Task and Ego Orientation in Sport Questionnaire developed by Duda and Nicholls was translated into Italian and administered to 802 young athletes, 248 girls and 554 boys aged 8 to 14 years, drawn from a range of individual and team sports, to examine its factor structure. Data sets of a calibration sample (boys 12–14 years) and of four cross-validation samples (boys 8–11 years, girls 8–11 years, boys 12–14 years, and girls 12–14 years) were subjected to confirmatory factor analysis specifying, as in the original questionnaire, an Ego Orientation scale (6 items) and a Task Orientation scale (7 items). Results across sex and age yielded χ/ df ratios ranging from 1.95 to 3.57, GFI indices above .90, AGFI indices ranging from .90 to .92, and RMSEA values not above .10. Findings provided acceptable support for the two-dimension structure of the test. In the whole sample, the Ego factor accounted for the 27.2% of variance and the Task factor accounted for the 33.5% of variance. Acceptable internal consistency of the two scales was also shown, with Cronbach α values ranging from .73 to .85.