Study of social self-concept invariance in physical activity individual and collective practitioners

Abstract

This study aims to explore the configural, metric and scalar invariance according to gender and the practice of collective physical activity of the AUSO questionnaire of Fernández-Zabala et al. (2016); also to compare the scores obtained by the subgroups. The sample consisted of 278 university students (M = 21.16 years old, DT = 19,238) divided equally according to gender and physical activity practice. After verifying the strict invariance in both cases, the results show that there are no significant differences in any of the factors according to sex, but rather as a function of physical activity practice: those students who perform collective physical activity obtain higher scores in Social Responsibility and Social Competence. Involving in collective sports offers socializing opportunities that allow participants to develop interaction skills and facilitates understanding of the existing social structure through the practice of collective physical activity.