Development of the Mental, Emotional, and Bodily Toughness Inventory in Collegiate Athletes and Nonathletes

Abstract

Context: The assessment of an individual's mental toughness would assist clinicians in enhancing an individual's performance, improving compliance with the rehabilitation program, and improving the individual treatment program. However, no sound measure of mental toughness exists.Objective: To develop a new measure of mental toughness, the Mental, Emotional, and Bodily Toughness Inventory (MeBTough).Design: Participants were invited to complete a 45-item questionnaire.Setting: University research laboratory. Patients or Other Participants: A total of 261 undergraduate students were recruited to complete the questionnaire.Main Outcome Measure(s): The Rasch-calibrated item difficulties, fit statistics, and persons' mental toughness ability estimates were examined for model-data fit of the MeBTough.Results: Forty-three of the 45 items had good model-data fit with acceptable fit statistics. Results indicated that the distribution of items was fittingly targeted to the people and the collapsed rating scale functioned well. The item separation index (6.31) and separation reliability statistic (.98) provided evidence that the items had good variability with a high degree of confidence in replicating placement of the items from another sample.Conclusions: Results provided support for using the new measure of mental, emotional, and bodily toughness. N The difficulty of the items had good variability along the measurement scale, meaning respondents' differences could be identified well.

Mind Over Matter: The Development of the Mental Toughness Scale (MTS)

“…Other scales measuring MT such as the PPI-A, MTQ48 and MeBTough reveal Cronbach's alphas ranging from .70 and .90 (Golby et al, 2007;Clough et al, 2002;Mack & Ragan, 2008).Thus, the MTS's consistency is similar to other established scales measuring some element of MT. The results provided good evidence of convergent, divergent, and criterion related validity.…”

“…The MeBTough (Mack & Ragan, 2008) is a 43-item scale that was used to assess overall mental toughness. The scale consists of 3 elements: physical, mental and emotional behavior.…”

“…Research with these measures focuses primarily on other factors (e.g., performance enhancement, physical endurance and pain tolerance) rather than the psychometrics of MT itself (Crust & Clough, 2005;. Existing MT scales include the Psychological Performance Inventory (Loehr, 1986), the Psychological Performance Inventory-A (Golby, Sheard, & vanWersch, 2007), the Mental Toughness Questionnaire (Clough et al, 2002), and two more recently published measures, the Sports Mental Toughness Questionnaire (SMTQ; Sheard, Golby, & Wersch, 2009) and the Mental, Emotional, and Bodily Toughness Inventory (Mack & Ragan, 2008). All are still in developmental stages, have limited psychometric support, and lack evidence of construct validity.…”

“…Using Loehr's (1994) suggested constructs of mental, emotional and bodily toughness (self-confidence, negative energy, attention control, visual and imagery control, motivation, positive energy, attitude control, emotional and physical), Mack and Ragan (2008) generated items for each, resulting in the Mental, Emotional, and Bodily Toughness Inventory (MeBTough), a 43-item measure. Results of a Rasch analysis showed that the scale demonstrated a good model-data fit with an item separation reliability of 0.98; thus, items were consistent, showed good variability, and an adequate degree of difficulty (Mack & Ragan, 2008). Although the MeBTough showed potential for assessing MT, the sampling methods raise questions about the intended target population.…”

“…With no consensus on an appropriate measure of mental toughness, Mack and Ragan (2008) attempted to create a new scale using Loehr's (1994) definition of MT as "the ability to perform consistently toward the upper range of one's talent and skill, regardless of competitive circumstance (p.5)." In addition, Loehr viewed toughness to involve physical and emotional as well as mental components.…”