Developing a Scale for Assessing Sports Coaching Skills for Promoting Life Skills Acquisition

Abstract

This study identified life skills through sports coaches’ practical experiences and developed a psychological scale for assessing coaching skills for facilitating life skills acquisition. Participants were coaches engaged in sports coaching for young athletes in junior and senior high schools and colleges. We developed 40 coaching skills items for assessing life skills acquisition based on, first, preliminary semi-structured interviews with 20 coaches (17 men and 3 women, mean years of experience in coaching =15.8±7.7 years, 11 national championships, 5 national tournament participants, and 4 regional tournament participants) and, second, a preliminary questionnaire survey of 258 coaches (215 men and 43 women; 114 junior high school coaches (92 men and 22 women), 90 senior high school coaches (78 men and 12 women), and 54 college coaches (45 men and 9 women). We administered the primary survey that included 40 items to 551 sports coaches (458 men and 93 women) ; 171 junior high school coaches (122 men and 49 women) ; 230 senior high school coaches (195 men and 35 women), and 150 college coaches (141 men and 9 women). The results of exploratory factor analysis of their responses indicated four subscales composed of 16 items for assessing coaching skills used in daily coaching settings. These subscales included “Coaching to facilitate visualization,” “Coaching for developing the feeling of gratitude,” “Coaching to promote spontaneous actions,” and “Coaching to facilitate goal achievement.” These subscales had adequate reliability and validity. We named the newly developed scale for assessing the acquisition of life skills the “Sports Coaching Skills Scale.”