Metas sociales en las clases de Educación Física

Resum

Recent investigations point out that social goals should be taken into account in the study of motivation (e.g. Anderman & Anderman, 1999; Urdan & Maehr, 1995). The objective of this paper has been to validate in the Spanish context the only available scale for the evaluation of social goals in physical education classes: the Social Goal Scale-Physical Education (Guan, McBride, & Xiang, 2006). To achieve this, two studies with samples of 406 and 813 students in physical education classes were carried out. The psychometric properties of the scale were analyzed by carrying out some checks of internal consistency through the Cronbach alpha, some confirmatory factor analyses and a test of invariance across gender. Finally, external evidences of validity were looked for by using the «perceived competence» variable. The analysis of the data showed that the scale was valid and reliable for its use with Spanish adolescents in physical education classes. Also, the results revealed that social responsibility goal positively and significantly predicted perceived competence.