Structural validation of three German versions of behavioral and motivational scales in high-risk sports

The aim of the present research was to validate German language versions of three inventories in high-risk sports to facilitate future research in the significant population of German speaking high-risk sports participants. We translated the Sensation Seeking, Emotion Regulation and Agency Scale (SEAS), the Risk-Taking Inventory and the Accidents and Close Calls in Sport Inventory into German, then tested the hypothesized factor structures with 719 high-risk sport participants from the European Alps using Bayesian structural equation modelling (BSEM). The final models were all good fits to the data, had good internal consistency and displayed adequate discriminant validity. All inventories displayed the same factor structure as in the English inventories bar the G‑SEAS After inventory in which a three-factor model fitted better than a two-factor model. Possible reasons for this difference include differences in the sample population, translation bias, or cross-cultural differences; however it seems likely that the nuanced approach of BSEM allowed this study to disentangle emotion regulation transfer from agency transfer after participating in high-risk sport where previous attempts using other methods have failed to. This will allow future research in high-risk sport to be conducted beyond English speaking populations and more significantly, facilitate the investigation of differences between the transfer effects of agency and emotion regulation.