Coach and Athlete Burnout - West Virginia University

number of years swimming competitively, number of hours spent per week on
Burnout 12
swimming-related duties, and variables pertaining to their academic level and level of
competition.
Athlete Burnout Questionnaire (ABQ). To assess burnout in athletes the Athlete
Burnout Questionnaire (Raedeke & Smith, 2001) was used (see Appendix B). This
multidimensional inventory contains 15 items that assess three subscales of sport burnout.
Subscales include a reduced sense of accomplishment, emotional and physical
exhaustion, and sport devaluation. Participants respond to the degree each item applies to
him or her using an ordinal scale ranging from 1 to 5, with 1 denoting “almost never” and
5 denoting “almost always.” The 1 st and 14 th items are reversed scored. Although a
fairly new means of assessing sport-specific burnout in athletes, this inventory went
through several stages of development to establish its psychometric properties before
reaching its current state.
The first stage involved examining the psychometric properties of a preliminary
burnout scale used in Raedeke’s (1997) previous related research. This inventory was
administered to swimmers from USA Swimming and consisted of 21 items that measured
each of the three dimensions on a 5-point ordinal scale. The results of a factor analysis
verified a three-factor structure and indicated that each of the dimensions measured was
internally consistent with Cronbach’s alpha levels above .70. The total variance
accounted for in the factor analytic model was 60%. Further, the reduced sense of
accomplishment scale split into two separate factors, distinguished by the negatively or
positively worded items.