Development and validation of an in-competition emotion measure: the Brief In-Competition Emotion (BICE) scale

Objectives: We aimed to develop a concise psychometric scale to assess athletes’ in-competition emotions, which would reduce the practical and conceptual limitations of previous measures.

Design: Four studies were designed to develop and assess the validity of the new Brief In-Competition Emotion (BICE) scale.

Method: In Study 1, the content validity of 39 emotion adjectives was investigated using expert analysis, 9 adjectives were subsequently removed. In Study 2, 402 university athletes used the remaining 30 adjectives to record their in-competition emotions and confirmatory factor analyses and a reliability removal method was used to create the 10-item BICE scale. Study 3 (N = 109) and Study 4 (N = 74) consisted of both concurrent and predictive validity assessments of the BICE scale.

Results: Construct validity, reliability and confirmatory factor analyses completed during Study 1 and Study 2 resulted in the development of the 10-item BICE scale, consisting of five composite emotion factors: anger, anxiety, excitement, dejection and happiness. The findings from Study 3 and Study 4 showed that the BICE scale presented acceptable levels of concurrent and predictive validity.

Conclusions: The BICE scale is a rigorously developed parsimonious scale which offers researchers new opportunities for investigation and provides applied practitioners with a new method of evaluating in-competition intervention efficacies.