Validity and reliability of the Ottawa Mental Skills Assessment tool (OMSAT-3).

Abstract

The Ottawa Mental Skills Assessment Tool (OMSAT) was devised by Salmela and colleagues (1992) to measure a broad range of athletes' mental skills. Bota (1993) empirically tested the first and second versions of the OMSAT and recommended that the instrument be further revised. The purposes of this study were to create an enhanced version of the OMSAT (OMSAT-3), assess its psychometric properties, and determine the relative importance of each mental skill presented in the inventory. The OMSAT-3 was comprised of 85 questions, six of which measured social desirability, and 12 mental skills scales that were regrouped under the following three broader conceptual components: foundations skills, affective skills, and cognitive skills. It was administered to 462 individuals, however only 335 athletes' (175 males and 160 females) scores were included in the analysis. Subjects came from various sports, with hockey, soccer, water polo, basketball, swimming, and baseball being the most predominant ones. Results demonstrated that the scales had acceptable internal consistency, the mean alpha score being.80. Because of the behaviourally-related, situation-dependent nature of the inventory, most of the OMSAT-3 scales did not yield good test-retest reliability estimates. In terms of validity, the OMSAT-3 was found to significantly discriminate between competitive and elite level athletes. The best discriminating scales were Commitment, Stress Control, and Refocusing. When asked to list mental components that were most important and/or useful to their performance, athletes rated "belief/self-confidence" as being the most important one. Draper, Salmela, and Durand-Bush (1995) conducted a confirmatory factor analysis on the second version of the OMSAT and found that the proposed factor model fit the data well. Future researchers need to conduct the same type of analysis with the OMSAT-3 to determine the adequacy of its factor structure.