Fear of water is the strongest predictor for no or low swimming competencies. Some individuals will never learn to swim due to their complete avoidance of water, whereas others might have difficulty with learning due to the fact that they cannot sufficiently relax their body to facilitate floating or swimming. Therefore, it is important to identify these people and to establish effective teaching strategies that can best help this specific population. Recognizing this, there is a clear need for an assessment tool which can help swim teachers and coaches identify people with a fear of water. The study aimed to first develop and then validate a fear of water assessment questionnaire (FWAQ). 2074 male and female people participated in the creation of a 40-item questionnaire. The exploratory factor showed that a 3 factor solution including 20 items was most sensiblesuch a solution accounted for 31.69% of explained variance and the Cronbach's alpha α was 0.831, which makes for a reliable enough solution. A subsequent discriminant function analysis correctly classified 98.2% of participants. We concluded that the findings from this study support that the FWAQ is a valid scale that effectively identify people with fear of water.

In recent research, we found that the use of goggles and snorkel benefited non-swimmers with fear of water in a learn-to-swim program. Our purpose in this study was to examine the effects of using goggles and snorkel during a learn-to-swim program on the aquatic skills of young non-swimmers without fear of water. We modelled this research on our prior study. Following informed parental consent, 40 children (aged 10–11 years) were randomly divided into two groups: one that used goggles and snorkel (GS) and one that did not (NGS). After 4 weeks (five sessions per week) of learn-to-swim intervention, both groups improved aquatic skills such that the only group differences were for the blowing bubbles test, for which the learn-to-swim program resulted in smaller gains for the GS than the NGS group. Thus, the use (vs. non-use) of goggles and snorkels during the learn-to-swim program had no significant effect on most aquatic skills of young non-swimmers without fear of water. The only exception was a significant finding of reduced improvement in blowing bubbles in the goggles and snorkels group when compared to the no goggles and snorkel group. Together with past findings these results highlight important learn-to-swim differences between young non-swimmers with and without fear of water.