Psychometric Properties of Cohen Acrophobia Questionnaire among Athletes

Document Type : Original Article/Open Access/ Released under (CC BY-NC 4.0) license

Authors

1 Motor Behavior Department, Sport Sciences and Health, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran

2 Associate Professor, Motor Behavior Department, Sport Sciences and Health, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran

3 Motor Behavior Department, Sport Sciences and Health, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

Acrophobia is one of the most common fears that one loses thinking and even standing in face of it. The purpose of this study was to investigate psychometric properties of Cohen Acrophobia Questionnaire (ACQ) among Iranian athletes. 225 athletes (75 girls and 150 boys) age ranged 18-50 years old (25.70±6.86 years) and sport experiences of 8.5 ± 3 year participated in this study. The acrophobia questionnaire includes two items of anxiety and avoidance, each containing 20 questions. Prior to the factor analyses, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin and Bartlett's test of sphericity was used to assess the suitability of the respondent data for factor analysis. Then, a confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the construct validity of the questionnaire using Absolute, Comparative and Parsimony fit indices. It was used the internal consistency coefficient of Cronbach's alpha to calculate the reliability of questions in each subscale. The findings of confirmatory factor analysis showed that the comparative, absolute, and parsimony indices are in acceptable range. Also, the results of Cronbach's alpha test showed that reliability coefficient of anxiety and avoidance subscales were .96 and .97 respectively. the findings of this study indicate that, Cohen acrophobia questionnaire could be used as a reliable tool to measure acrophobia among Iranian athletes.

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