A Psychometric Analysis of an Inventory for Assessing Children's Attitudes Toward Physical Activity1

Simon and Smoll's (1974) inventory for assessing children's attitudes toward physical activity (CATPA) has been used in numerous studies of children's at-titudinal dispositions and their relationships to a variety of situational and dispositional variables. Recent research revealing low attitude-behavior relationships and instability across time has raised questions about the psychometric properties of the CATPA inventory. The purpose of this research was to psychometrically analyze the six attitude subdomains of this semantic differential inventory and derive recommendations for its modification. The first of three studies reported herein included a four-phase analysis of the CATPA scores of 1,752 children, the results of which indicated that (a) three of the original eight bipolar adjectives were not good discriminators, (b) internal consistencies were high and were not improved by reciprocal average reweighting, and (c) a seven-factor structure emerged, differing from the underlying six-factor theoretical model. In Study 2 a revised CATPA inventory was administered to 1,895 boys and girls. The findings supported the inventory revisions and suggested the necessity for dichotomizing one of the six original attitude sub-domains. Study 3 incorporated the derived rescoring procedures in the reanalysis of earlier attitudinal investigations. Results revealed that modifying the scales neither changed the nature or strength of attitude-behavior relationships nor did it affect the intraindividual stability of CATPA over a period of time. The revised CATPA inventory was deemed to be an improvement over the original instrument because of its superior psychometric characteristics and reduced length, thereby making it more efficient for administrative purposes.