Psychometric analysis of the Resilience Scale in the sport of football

Abstract

From a strictly athletic perspective, the demands of competition level sport lead to the development of capabilities for psychological tolerance and overcoming adversities related to engaging in sport, which can be related directly or indirectly with the construct of Resilience. One of the instruments designed is the Resilience Scale developed by Wagnield, and Young (1993), translated into Portuguese by Pesce, Assis, Avanci, Santos, Malaquias, and Carvalhaes (2005), which used a Brazilian sample and was adapted by Vigario, Serpa, and Rosado (2009) using a Portuguese sample. Our study aims: 1. –to describe the global resilience level of the scale adapted to Spanish with a sample of footballers, comparing it with the Portuguese study using a sample of students developed by Vigario et al. (2009); 2. –to establish the psychometric characteristics of the adapted scale by developing a confirmatory factorial analysis in which comparisons were made with the structure created by Vigario et al. (2009). The sample uconsisted in 110 footballers from official competitions divided into the age groups: 15 to 16 years old (n = 37), 17 to 18 years old (n = 54) and 19 years old and older (n =19). The age range encompassed 15 to 21-year-olds with an average age of 16.71 years. The results show higher global Resilience in the footballer sample than in the students´ (p < .001). It also partially confirmed the factorial structure of the two factors proposed, which obtained the highest levels of total explained variance in our study (30.36%).