Scoring the Toughness of High School Student Athletes

Background/Purpose: The Reduced Mental, Emotional and Bodily Toughness Inventory for Adolescents (Reduced MeBT-Ad) was developed to measure toughness of youth athletes (Grant & Grant, 2014).  Developed specifically to accommodate the reading level and instrument length conducive for younger participants, this survey also permitted valid comparisons across gender, which was a weakness of its parent survey – the MeBTough (Gao, Mach, Ragan, & Ragan, 2012; Grant & Grant, 2014).   The next stage of development for the Reduced MeBT-Ad was to find the normative scores so that practitioners could use this instrument when evaluating the toughness of adolescent athletes. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to find the norm-based scores for mental, emotional and bodily toughness of high school student athletes.

Method: Researchers surveyed a sample of high school athletes (n=372) in the Southeastern U.S.  All athletes were contacted via their high school coaches.  After proper consent was give, student athletes completed the nine Likert-scale items of the Reduced MeBT-Ad via the Qualtrics online program. Data collection was conducted within two weeks of the midpoint of the particular season in which the athlete was participating.  All data were then analyzed to find the valid and reliable mean scores, or norm-based scores, of high school student athletes.

Analysis/Results: Researchers scored the Reduced MeBT-Ad surveys and converted them to a 100-point scale.  Results showed a negatively skewed distribution of the mean score for the total sample (M=72.02, SD=18.6) as well as based on sex (male M=74.77, SE= 1.1; female M=67.41, SE=1.7).  Independent Sample T Tests and ANOVA analysis revealed no significant differences between or within groups based on gender, age, grade, or sport as well as types of sport, i.e., individual versus team. Cronbach’s alpha (a=0.805) indicated good internal consistency for measuring toughness.  Normative scores were considered valid and reliable for high school student athletes.

Conclusions: The current study supplied norm-based scores of the mental, emotional and bodily toughness of high school athletes using the Reduced MeBT-Ad instrument.  Results provided practitioners with evaluation standards for assessing the toughness of young athletes.  Future research could expand this study by investigating the toughness of middle school student athletes as well as adolescent athletes outside of school, i.e., club teams.