Cross-Cultural Invariance of the Mental Toughness Inventory Among Australian, Chinese, and Malaysian Athletes: A Bayesian Estimation Approach

The aims of this study were to assess the cross-cultural invariance of athletes' self-reports of mental toughness and to introduce and illustrate the application of approximate measurement invariance using Bayesian estimation for sport and exercise psychology scholars. Athletes from Australia (...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of sport & exercise psychology 2016-04, Vol.38 (2), p.187-202
Main Authors: Gucciardi, Daniel F, Zhang, Chun-Qing, Ponnusamy, Vellapandian, Si, Gangyan, Stenling, Andreas
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
approximate measurement invariance
Athletes
Athletes - psychology
Australia
Bayes Theorem
Bayesian
Bayesian analysis
Bayesian Statistics
China
Comparative analysis
Cross-Cultural Comparison
cross-cultural psychology
cultural sport psychology
Estimating techniques
Factor Structure
Female
Humans
Malaysia
Male
Males
Mental health
mentally tough
Personality Inventory - statistics & numerical data
Personality traits
Resilience, Psychological
Resistance (Psychology)
Self Report
Young Adult
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Summary:The aims of this study were to assess the cross-cultural invariance of athletes' self-reports of mental toughness and to introduce and illustrate the application of approximate measurement invariance using Bayesian estimation for sport and exercise psychology scholars. Athletes from Australia (n = 353, Mage = 19.13, SD = 3.27, men = 161), China (n = 254, Mage = 17.82, SD = 2.28, men = 138), and Malaysia (n = 341, Mage = 19.13, SD = 3.27, men = 200) provided a cross-sectional snapshot of their mental toughness. The cross-cultural invariance of the mental toughness inventory in terms of (a) the factor structure (configural invariance), (b) factor loadings (metric invariance), and (c) item intercepts (scalar invariance) was tested using an approximate measurement framework with Bayesian estimation. Results indicated that approximate metric and scalar invariance was established. From a methodological standpoint, this study demonstrated the usefulness and flexibility of Bayesian estimation for single-sample and multigroup analyses of measurement instruments. Substantively, the current findings suggest that the measurement of mental toughness requires cultural adjustments to better capture the contextually salient (emic) aspects of this concept.
ISSN:0895-2779
1543-2904
1543-2904
DOI:10.1123/jsep.2015-0320