Mental toughness : conceptualisation and measurement

Major challenges facing sport psychology researchers, practitioners, coaches, and athletes include understanding mental toughness and knowing how to train for it. Athletes and coaches have long identified mental toughness as an important attribute for performance. Practitioners have devised training approaches for mental toughness—often based on anecdotal notions of what mental toughness is and how it should be developed. The research available on mental toughness is scarce, with only a few recent but limited advances. Fundamental to the challenge of understanding and training mental toughness, there is a critical need for research to develop a model of mental toughness that is not based on anecdote, but rather on sound research methods and theoretical underpinnings. Following on from conceptualisation, there is a need to develop an instrument to measure mental toughness. Taken together, a conceptual model and a measurement approach are the tools needed by researchers to develop and test mental toughness training programs. The purpose of this thesis was to address some of these issues by capitalising on the strengths of both qualitative and quantitative methods to: (a) critically examine a popular test of mental toughness; (b) determine specific characteristics of mental toughness and understand the interrelationship between those characteristics; (c) develop a model of mental toughness that draws together specific characteristics; (d) produce a mental toughness definition; (e) develop the Mental Toughness Inventory, a robust and valid instrument that demonstrates a sound factor structure, strong reliabilities, and invariance across gender, age, and level of competition (i.e., demonstrating within-network validity); and (f) determine the relative congruence between scores on the Mental Toughness Inventory and theoretically related constructs (i.e., demonstrating between-network validity). In line with these aims, Study 1 evaluated the psychometric properties of an existing, popular, and yet unsubstantiated test of mental toughness—the Psychological Performance Inventory (PPI). Given the breadth and depth of mental toughness as evidenced by the literature, the PPI was not expected to provide a reasonable model. Instead, the study was intended to inform the researcher on the psychometric strengths of the PPI and guide the development of a new measure of mental toughness throughout the remainder of the thesis. The PPI was examined using both within-network and between-network validity checks and responses from 263 student-athletes in Years 7–12 (12 to 19 years of age). Study 2 was a qualitative study that examined the interview data of over 30 elite sportspeople to determine the characteristics of mental toughness. The purpose of this study was to develop a conceptual model and definition of mental toughness that draws together all the characteristics in a way that adds meaning and clarity to the concept. The purpose of Studies 3 and 4 was to construct, refine, and validate the Mental Toughness Inventory (MTI)—a measure of mental toughness emanating from the findings of Studies 1 and 2. Studies 3 and 4 critically examined the construct validity of the MTI using both within-network and between-network validation on the basis of responses from institution-based athletes (from sports programs such as those run by the Australian Institute of Sport) and school-based athletes (from a selective sports high school). Furthermore, Studies 3 and 4 provided the scope to examine invariance of the mental toughness factor structure across groups, group mean-level differences, and interaction effects. The results of Study 1 provided a number of insights into the status of the PPI, raised an interesting conundrum regarding the interface between conceptualisation and instrumentation, and provided guidance for instrument development that would become the empirical basis of subsequent quantitative studies. The qualitative results of Study 2 unearthed a multidimensional model of mental toughness, containing 12 first-order factors each of which contribute to a higher order (or Global) mental toughness factor. The 12 mental toughness characteristics identified are: self-efficacy, potential, mental self-concept, value, personal bests, commitment, stress minimisation, perseverance, positive comparisons, positivity, task familiarity, and task focus. Study 3 involved the construction of the Mental Toughness Inventory (MTI), with results revealing excellent validity from a within-network perspective (including confirmatory factor analysis, goodness of fit, internal reliability, and invariance across groups). Study 4 results revealed that MTI factors correlated more strongly with theoretically-related concepts and less strongly with unrelated concepts—thus demonstrating betweennetwork validity (convergent and discriminant). Study 4 also revealed a number of significant main effects of age (favouring older athletes), gender (favouring male athletes) and group (a contextual effect where institution-based athletes rate themselves more “rigorously” relative to school-based athletes at their level) on mental toughness. Study 4 also showed some non-linear effects which broadly show that institution-based athletes decrease in mental toughness from 12 to 16 years of age (as do school-based athletes) before making significant improvements on several characteristics of mental toughness from 17 years and older (school-based athletes continue to decrease in mental toughness through to adulthood)—a series of findings attesting to the role of context in the assessment of mental toughness. These findings have important implications for researchers, sports psychologists, coaches, and athletes. For sport psychologists, coaches and athletes, this research presents some clear characteristics of mental toughness that may be beneficial for training and development. Furthermore, the mental toughness model provides a more fine-grained view of mental toughness, one that is both easier to understand and which lends itself more readily to further development. These results demonstrate strong contextual effects, which need to be carefully considered when assessing and developing mental toughness. For sporting organisations, this research points to a number of things that can be done at an institutional level—particularly in relation to creating an environment that is most likely to facilitate the positive development of various components of mental toughness. Finally, for research and continued theorising about mental toughness, the findings from this thesis support viewing mental toughness as a combination of cognitive, behavioural, and emotive processes that work together in combating adversity or pressure. Taken together, the conceptualising and empirical work conducted in this study are proposed to advance the field of research—creating opportunities to study the effectiveness of interventions designed to enhance mental toughness. Furthermore, the results provide practitioners, coaches, and athletes with a concrete understanding of mental toughness such that they are better equipped to devise training approaches and to handle pressure and adversity en route to athletic success. Mental Toughness: Conceptualisation and Measurement 4