Abbreviated version in spanish of the POMS questionnaire for adult athletes and general population

Abstract

This paper reports on an abbreviated Spanish form of the questionnaire for the profile of mood states, POMS. It is a new study on the internal validity of this instrument with athletes, and offers evidence to extend its use to the general population. The participants completed the POMS adult version, with 44 items and 6 first-order factors labelled Anger, Fatigue, Vigour, Friendliness, Tension, and Depressed Mood (Andrade et al., 2010). In the athletes’ sample (n = 400), the results of the confirmatory factor analysis were acceptable, although they provided guidelines to refine the measurement model. Thus, we proceeded to reduce the number of items, keeping only 5 for each theoretical dimension: the most statistically and substantively appropriate ones. This way we also achieved a significant increase in the goodness-of-fit of the model. Subsequently, we carried out confirmatory factor analysis of the same pattern in the general population sample (n = 400). Finally, we used a multi-group approach to test the invariance of the model on two levels, configuration and metric equivalence.