Development and validation of the athletes’ rights survey

Abstract

A recognised imbalance of power exists between athletes and sporting institutions. Recent cases of systemic athlete abuse demonstrate the relationship between power disparities and harassment and abuse in sport. Embedding human rights principles into sporting institutions is a critical step towards preventing harassment and abuse in sport. In 2017, the World Players Association (WPA) launched the Universal Declaration of Player Rights. A year later, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) developed their Athletes’ Rights and Responsibilities Declaration. These two documents codify benchmarks ‘for international sporting organisations to meet their obligations to protect, respect and guarantee the fundamental rights of players’. This paper is the first project exploring athletes’ knowledge, understanding and awareness of rights in the sports context. This study presents the development and validation of a survey investigating athletes’ knowledge of these declarations, associated attitudes/beliefs and understanding of how these rights can be enacted in practice. The survey includes 10 statements of athlete rights based on the WPA and IOC declarations. Face validation was assessed by distributing the survey to 10 athletes and conducting qualitative interviews with a subgroup of four athletes. The survey was reworked into 13 statements, and the tool was validated with 611 responses through confirmatory factor analysis. Key findings include a weak correlation between athletes’ knowledge and their attitudes/beliefs, and challenges with the interpretation of words such as ‘pressure,’ ‘violence,’ ‘harassment’ and ‘intimidation.’ This validation puts forward the first survey instrument to directly test athletes’ knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about rights in sport.

‘Knowing we have these rights does not always mean we feel free to use them’: athletes’ perceptions of their human rights in sport

“…Study strengths include using a large data set, a valid survey codeveloped with athletes, sports experts and academics, and two coding systems for correlation analyses as well as ordered logistic regression to explain how individual and sports characteristics, as well as knowledge of rights, influence athletes’ attitudes and beliefs. 35 Limitations of the study include respondent clustering on two continents. Limitations around demographic data are also acknowledged, including a lack of analysis around ethnicity, sexuality and gender as a spectrum.…”

“…A two-part web-based survey ( table 1 ) was developed and validated. 35 The knowledge construct consisted of five yes/no statements drawn directly from the WPA and IOC athletes’ rights declarations to determine athletes’ concrete knowledge of five rights. The attitudes/beliefs construct assessed the degree to which athletes agreed/disagreed with eight associated plain language statements via a seven-point Likert scale to test how athletes express and/or experience each right while they are training and competing in their sport.…”

“…A two-part web-based survey (table 1) was developed and validated 35. The knowledge construct consisted of five yes/no statements drawn directly from the WPA and IOC athletes’ rights declarations to determine athletes’ concrete knowledge of five rights.…”