Exploratory factor analysis of instruments for dual career assessment

Abstract

The dual career is a permanent and demanding challenge with the simultaneous fulfilment of student and high-performance athlete roles. Recognising the lack of quantitative research in Portugal and of an instrument that allows the evaluation of the reconciliation of the high-performance sports career with the school career, we developed 3 data collection instruments that we applied through the Questionnaire to student-athletes who attend the conciliation model Portuguese called the High-Performance Support Unit at School.

This exploratory study aims to demonstrate the first evidence of the validity of the instruments developed in all three dimensions that support this conciliation model: sports management, school management and health and well-being. 

A total of 278 high-performance student-athletes (n=278) between 14 and 19 years of age, 126 girls and 151 boys (M = 16.01, SD = 1,246) participated in this study.

The results of the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin test (KMO) with values of 0.648 in the school management dimension, 0.757 in the sporting dimension and 0.871 in the dimension of health and well-being and the Bartlett sphericity test demonstrate an apparent validity of the instruments for the analysis of the principal components. The values of Cronbach's Alpha (α) confirm the reliability of the various questions posed in the three instruments.

In the exploratory factor analysis, we concluded that the three instruments were developed with very acceptable indices of validity and reliability, demonstrating that they can be used, with a high degree of confidence, in future investigations on this model of conciliation of the dual career in Portugal.