Measurement and conceptual issues regarding the assessment of situational threat and competitive trait anxiety in ice hockey

The purpose of this dissertation was to illustrate a number of limitations in sport psychology research regarding the measurement and conceptualisation of situational threat and competitive trait anxiety (CTA). Study 1 was conducted to show how research in sport psychology can be enhanced by combining nomothetic and idiographic procedures, and to highlight that this combined approach provides researchers with opportunities to validate nomothetic principles at the individual level, while simultaneously generating nomothetic hypotheses from idiographic analyses. To illustrate these points, a nomothetic profile of situational threat perceptions based upon the responses of 46 ice hockey players reported by Dunn and Nielsen (1993) was compared against the perceptual profiles of three individual players. The comparisons showed many unique perceptual differences between the group and individual solutions. Results also revealed that athletes recognise a variety of situational threats within the sport of ice hockey. Study 2 examined the extent to which 178 intercollegiate ice hockey players were predisposed to worrying about some of the situational threats identified in Study 1. Specifically, Study 2 employed a multidimensional conceptualisation of situational CTA, and investigated whether four A-trait dimensions proposed, in part, by Endler (1983), provided a valid framework for assessing cognitive CTA in ice hockey. A multi-method multi-analytic design revealed four cognitive CTA dimensions that were congruent with the physical danger anxiety, performance failure anxiety, negative social evaluation anxiety, and situational uncertainty anxiety dimensions proposed by Endler (1983). Having established that individual differences in situational worry tendencies exist, individual athlete-worry profiles were used to highlight the limitations of relying solely on the Sport Competition Anxiety Test (SCAT: Martens, 1977) and Sport Anxiety Scale (SAS: Smith, Smoll, & Schutz, 1990) as measures of CTA. It is argued that the SCAT and SAS assess athletes' proneness for anxiety to "sport in general," but provide little information about why athletes experience this anxiety since neither instrument gives consideration to the existence of different situational threats that might reside within the competitive sport environment. Recommendations to extend the scope (i.e., coverage) of the nomological network surrounding cognitive CTA theory are proposed.