Mexican Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction and Frustration Scale in Physical Education

Abstract

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Basic psychological needs are an energizing state that, if satisfied, will produce an increase in confidence and a healthy motivational orientation that leads to wellness. Frustration of these needs is the opposite concept of satisfaction, which refers to the negative sensation experimented by an individual when he or she perceives that their psychological needs are being actively limited by the actions of the significant other. To date, we have not found instruments validated in Spanish that measure both the satisfaction and the frustration of basic psychological needs in the physical education (PE) context. Therefore, the aims of this study are adapting the Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction and Frustration Scale (BPNSFS) to the PE context in Mexico; and examine its psychometric properties, structure, and factorial invariance by gender in a sample of fifth- and sixth-grade elementary school students. This study included a total of 1,470 fifth- and sixth-grade students from elementary schools in the metropolitan area of Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico. The results support the reliability, validity, structure, and strict invariance of the sixth Mexican version of the BPNSFS in physical education (BPNSFS-PE). The BPNSFS-PE can be used to measure the satisfaction and/or frustration of the basic psychological needs of students in PE class and to perform comparisons between groups of boys and girls.

Keywords

• self-determination theory
• autonomy
• competence
• relatedness
• physical education
• invariance