Autonomy Support, Needs Satisfaction, Motivation, and Intention to Do Physical Activities in Adolescents: A Validation study

Components of self-determination theory work very well in physical education settings. However, very few studies in Iran focused on this issue which might be due to the lack of validated questionnaires. The present study aimed to investigate the psychometric properties of a Persian questionnaire derived and translated from four scales assessing the self-determination components of physical activity/education in adolescent students.
This study used an exploratory-confirmatory method. The participants were 400 high-school students (16-18 years old) studying in Aliabad Katoul, Golestan, Iran, during 2019. The items of the English standard questionnaires were converted into Persian using the translation-retranslation method. Subsequently, nine experts confirmed the validity of the final Persian questionnaire. The questionnaires included Needs Support in Physical Education Questionnaire which is used to measure autonomy support; Sport Climate in Physical Education Questionnaire which is used for measuring needs satisfaction; Intrinsic Motivation Scale which is used to measure intrinsic motivation for having physical education in the leisure-time; and Intention to Physical Activity used to measure intention to perform physical activities outside the school. We employed factor analysis and structural equation modeling to examine the validity of the questionnaire.
The descriptive statistics showed that all boys and girls were in almost identical ages. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the Persian version of the questionnaires had relatively high powers for assessing self-determination components in physical education (GoF=0.729). Moreover, perceived autonomy support positively affected the needs satisfaction and intrinsic motivation in physical education. Moreover, intrinsic motivation in physical education was transferred into intrinsic motivation outside school and subsequently affected intention to do physical activities (all T>1.96).
The Persian questionnaire validated in this study enjoys a relatively high power for assessing the self-determination components in physical education. Moreover, autonomy support plays an important role in motivating students to be physically active.