Less time, better quality. Shortening questionnaires to assess team environment and goal orientation

Copyright © 2013 Cambridge University Press. When assessing team environments in youth sport, participants often spend substantial time responding to lots of items in questionnaires, causing a lack of efficiency (i.e. time and effort) and a decrease of data quality. The purpose of this work was to create short-forms of the questionnaires PeerMCYSQ, SCQPeer, TEOSQ, and also to analyse the existing short-form of the SCQCoach. In Study 1 we developed the short-forms of the instruments. We shortened the questionnaires by using both theory driven and data-driven criteria. In Study 2, we used also qualitative and quantitative data with the aim of validating the short-forms. Finally, in Study 3 we tested the last version of the short-forms and sought evidences concerning their criterion validity. The results showed evidence that supports the psychometric merit of these short-forms: (a) significantly less missing values were obtained; (b) all the factors obtained alpha values above.70; (c) confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that the short-forms fitted the hypothesized models well; (d) correlations between variables were coherent with expectations, and (e) structural equation modeling results showed significant paths consistent with previous literature. On average, our participants only spent a third of the time used to complete the original questionnaires.