Adaptation of the Precompetitive Anxiety Scale (SAS-2), for the Colombian population

Abstract

Anxiety is a natural response toward an event that subjectively is perceived as risky. During anxiety, a person may have physiological, behavioral and cognitive changes that affect the task that develops. In the sports field, these changes impact the performance of athletes during a competition. Precompetitive anxiety has become one of the main factors to take in account and that is why this field needs accurate and suitable tests such as SAS-2. Taking in count this necessity, the objective of this research was to adapt the Sport Anxiety Scale-2 (SAS-2) for Colombian population. To accomplish this goal, there was a process of translation and counter-translation followed by a review process made by expert judges. With the final version of the test 416 athletes were tested with an age range between 9 and 76 (x?= 21.759; SD = 11.313); 155 women (37.26%) and 261 men (62.74%). After confirmatory and reliability analysis, results show that the new test has a proper adaptation in terms of language, structure (three factors: somatic anxiety, worry and concentration disruption) and strong indicators of goodness of fit and reliability having values of 0.758 and 0.941. In conclusion, the scale SAS-2 is now an adapted test, trustworthy and reliable to measure and evaluate precompetitive anxiety responses on Colombian population. © (2024), Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Murcia.