ITALIAN VALIDATION OF MOTIVATION OF MARATHONERS SCALES

Purpose In sport activities, the link between the willingness and motivation is fundamental to reach the aim set. Several reasons push people to do physical activity, one of them is health, also defined by the term positive addiction(1). For these reasons, since the 70's a lot of people began to run and both social and sport psychologist developed an interest of that phenomenon. One of the most important was developed by Carmack and Martens(2). Finally, Master and colleagues (1993,3) performed an analysis of the researchers that investigated the motivation to run in order to develop the “Motivation of Marathoners Scales (MoMS)” questionnaire that examined the motivation of the marathon runners to run. Due to its excellent psychometric properties(3) we developed an Italian version of the MoMS (MoMS-it). Method Before starting the administration and the data collection we translated the items following the translational procedure (4). Anonymously, 604 marathon runners (117 female and 487 male; age 47.32 ± 9.79) filled the italian version of the questionnaire. Cronbach’ alpha was calculated to assess the internal consistency of MoMS-it. A series of confirmatory and exploratory factor analysis (CFA, ECA) were performed. Paired T.test was performed for each factor in order to verify the different expression of each motivation between the gender and or ages of participants using the media value of the sample.. Results Cronbach’s alpha coefficient for the entire questionnaire was .91, as well as they were the consistencies of each scale. The CFA showed results similar to what Master and colleagues reported(3). Conclusion The data analysis showed that the translation of the items we performed produced a reliable Italian form of the MoMS and the results were similar to another recent work(6).