Exploring the dimensions of perfectionism in sport

The purpose of this study was to develop a scale to measure perfectionism among competitive athletes. The athletes (N = 384), including 183 males (48%) and 201 females (52%), attended a university in the southwestern U.S. and were considered moderately to highly skilled based on participation on their respective high school or college sports teams. The athletes completed an inventory comprised of 94 items that was generated for the purpose of identifying items that best reflected perfectionistic thinking within the context of sport competition. Most items were adapted from previously published, psychometrically, validated scales in the non-sport literature (e.g., Frost et al., 1990, Hewitt & Flett, 1990) and applied to competitive sport (e.g., Coach's Criticism). With .40 as the criterion for acceptable factor loadings, exploratory factor analyses revealed four dimensions, each consisting of 8 items (32 items total). The dimensions were Concern About Mistakes (CM), Personal Standards (PS), Parental Criticism (PC), and Coach Criticism (CC). Low inter-correlations between the four constructs indicated their independence, while high Cronbach alphas (rs ranging from .80 to .89), reflected high within-item consistency. The results of this study confirm that selected items accurately reflected evidence of perfectionistic thinking in the context of sport, supporting construct validity of the scale. However, results of MANOVA revealed no support for predicted gender differences on inventory items (p<.26). It was concluded that perfectionism is a construct that can be identified and measured among sports competitors. Future research in this area is clearly warranted.