Development Of Chinese Athlete Mental Health Scale

Under the goal of continuously challenging themselves and surpassing the originalresults, athletes have to bear different pressure and face unordinary challenges, thusmay lead to particular psychological health problems. Psychological health problemswill prevent athletes facing the development of inside and outside environment in astable way, and damage their potential and athletic ability. However, the psychologicalhealth problems of strong athletes in our country tend to be ignored, making us lessknow the psychological health problems of such a particular and important group.With the development of positive psychology, the positive psychological healthconcept has caught researchers’ attention. The measurement of psychological healthhas changed from a single dimension model only measuring psychological diseases toa dual-element model that adopts positive psychological health. Currently, themeasurement of psychological health of athletes in our country is lag behind, most ofthe measurements are based on the edition of foreign Symptom Checklist90(SCL-90). However, using a SCL-90result to evaluate the psychological health of anathlete is not enough. Therefore, it is very necessary to develop a psychological healthchecklist with our unique cultural characteristics which can reflect the psychologicalhealth characteristics of our athletes.Based on overviews of former researchers and the results of the open-endedquestionnaire with70athletes and8coaches，the preliminary structure of athletemental health was formed，and items were collected. The logical structure of athletemental health was constructed by the exploring factor analysis of the preliminaryquestionnaire and the confirmatory factor analysis of the formal scale, and ChineseAthlete Mental Health Scale was formed. At last, Chinese Athlete Mental HealthScale was examined by many indexes, and we also investigated the current charactersof athlete mental health. The results are as follows:1. Athlete mental health has two dimensional structures. They are Common MentalDisorders and Positive Mental Characteristics. Common Mental Disordersincludes four factors; those are depression, hostility, anxiety and somatization.Positive Mental Characteristics includes three factors; those are strong will, socialadjustment and Positive intelligence.2. Test-retest reliability, internal concordance coefficient, content validity, constructvalidity, index validity of Chinese Athlete Mental Health Scale are up to the Dual-Factor Model of Mental Health. The scale can be regarded as fitting tool ofestimating athlete mental health.3. Compared two dimensional structures and seven factors of athlete mental health,there is no significant difference on gender and sport level except strong will ongender. Except somatization, team athletes are significantly better than otherevent athletes on each dimensional structures and factors.