Abstract
Recently, opportunities for women and girls in sport are at the forefront of research and society. However, such increases do not directly translate to increased participation rates nor the challenging of traditional masculine sport norms. Coaches play an important role in girls’ sport experiences, and the ways they construct gender in their practices either confirm and/or challenge such experiences. Coaches have expressed a need for evidence-based tools to gain confidence in addressing and deconstructing ‘traditional’ binary gender discourses that impact their coaching practices and consequently, girls’ participation. Recent research has proposed advancing gender transformative coaching practices (e.g., Goorevich & LaVoi, 2024), inspiring the development of a novel tool: the Coaching Gender Self-Efficacy Scale (CGSES). Scale development and validation is one way to accurately predict and assess coaches’ beliefs and, as a result, their behaviours (Young et al., 2019). According to Boateng and colleagues (2018), scale creation consists of three phases; item development, scale development, and scale evaluation. This presentation focuses on the first two of these phases, including four coach focus groups (n = 21) to develop items, an expert panel (n = 4) to review and refine the items, and finally cognitive interviews (n = 4) to validate the proposed items before testing. The scale aims to evaluate coaches' confidence in recognizing and understanding their beliefs about gender and how this impacts their coaching. Our study offers insights into the scale development process of the CGSES; an assessment tool for future gender-based interventions to challenge gender hierarchies in sport.
