Sport Anxiety Scale (SAS)

Abstract

The Sport Anxiety Scale (SAS) is a highly specialized psychometric instrument designed to quantify trait anxiety specific to high-stakes competitive athletic settings. Originally introduced in 1990 by Smith, Smoll, and Schutz, the initial 21-item scale established a robust, multidimensional framework for assessing how athletes chronically experience competitive stress. This framework is organized around three distinct factors: Worry, Concentration Disruption, and Somatic Trait Anxiety.

A significant revision, the Sport Anxiety Scale-2 (SAS-2), was published in 2006. This updated 15-item version was streamlined for efficiency and broadened its applicability to both children and adult populations while rigorously maintaining the foundational three-factor structure. The SAS remains an essential diagnostic and research tool within sport psychology for understanding and managing performance-related anxiety.

Keywords

Sport Anxiety Scale, SAS, Sport Psychology, Competitive Anxiety, Cognitive Anxiety, Somatic Anxiety, Trait Anxiety, Performance Measurement, Concentration Disruption, Psychological Assessment.

Authors

Ronald E. Smith, Frank L. Smoll, Robert W. Schutz, Sean P. Cumming, Joel R. Grossbard.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Sport Anxiety Scale (SAS) is to provide a comprehensive and highly context-specific measurement of an athlete’s chronic disposition toward experiencing apprehension and tension in competitive environments. By exclusively focusing on the context of sport competition, the SAS successfully differentiates performance-related stress factors from measures of general anxiety, offering greater specificity for research and clinical practice.

The scale’s inherent multidimensional structure serves a crucial diagnostic utility, facilitating a clear distinction between the cognitive and somatic components of anxiety. Recognizing this distinction is vital for effective intervention, as cognitive anxiety (worry and concentration disruption) and somatic anxiety (physiological arousal) often exhibit divergent relationships with athletic performance outcomes, thereby guiding the selection of appropriate psychological strategies.

Construct

The SAS is fundamentally designed to measure Sport-Specific Trait Anxiety. This construct is predicated on the idea that competitive situations consistently serve as reliable stressors, prompting stable and characteristic responses of tension and apprehension in athletes. The scale operationalizes this complex construct through three distinct, yet interrelated, dimensions:

• Worry: This factor quantifies the athlete’s negative expectations, self-doubt, and cognitive concerns regarding potential failure, poor performance, or negative judgment from coaches, teammates, or spectators.
• Concentration Disruption: This dimension assesses the degree to which anxiety-related intrusive thoughts interfere with focused attention, leading to lapses in concentration during crucial moments of competition or performance execution.
• Somatic Trait Anxiety: This factor measures the stable physiological component of anxiety, encompassing characteristic symptoms experienced prior to or during competition, such as muscle tension, elevated heart rate, trembling, and gastrointestinal distress.

Validity

The validity of the SAS has been rigorously established through comprehensive psychometric evaluation across numerous studies. Construct validity was initially confirmed in the 1990 foundational study through the application of factor analysis, which provided strong empirical support for the hypothesized three-factor model. This factorial structure has been repeatedly replicated across diverse athletic populations and cultural settings, confirming that the scale accurately measures the theoretical components of competitive trait anxiety.

Furthermore, the scale demonstrates high discriminant validity, evidenced by the finding that while SAS scores correlate highly with other sport-specific measures of anxiety, they remain empirically distinct from measures of general anxiety or broad personality traits. Predictive validity is supported by research indicating that elevated scores on the cognitive subscales (Worry and Concentration Disruption) often negatively predict objective performance outcomes, especially in sports demanding high levels of precision, focus, and strategic execution.

Reliability

The SAS exhibits strong indices of reliability, confirming its consistency and stability as a critical measurement tool in sport psychology. Internal consistency, calculated using Cronbach’s alpha coefficients, typically falls within the range of 0.75 and 0.88 for the three core subscales (Worry, Concentration Disruption, and Somatic Trait Anxiety) across both the original and revised versions, indicating high homogeneity among the items composing each factor.

The instrument also demonstrates moderate to high Test-retest reliability coefficients. This stability is crucial as it confirms the scale’s capacity to measure an enduring psychological trait over extended periods, rather than merely reflecting temporary state fluctuations. This characteristic makes the SAS highly suitable for longitudinal studies and for making reliable clinical assessments regarding an athlete’s inherent anxiety disposition.

Factor Analysis

The development of the SAS was firmly rooted in a multidimensional model of anxiety, which was empirically tested using statistical methodologies, including factor analysis and, subsequently, Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). The CFA results consistently demonstrated that the three-factor model was statistically superior to alternative models, such as a single-factor structure or a simple two-factor cognitive/somatic model.

The original 21-item SAS successfully confirmed the distinct presence of the three factors—Worry, Concentration Disruption, and Somatic Trait Anxiety—which collectively accounted for a substantial proportion of the total variance observed in competitive anxiety scores. The subsequent SAS-2 (2006) also utilized CFA to validate its reduced 15-item structure across samples of both adolescents and adults, confirming the robust and retained three-factor structure with improved efficiency. This structural integrity allows practitioners to finely analyze which specific components of competitive anxiety are most detrimental to a given athlete or sport performance context.

Instrument

Test Type: Self-report psychometric scale, Trait Measure

Format: 21 items (Original SAS, 1990) or 15 items (SAS-2, 2006). Items are rated on a 4-point Likert scale.

Language Available: English (original), with numerous validated translations available for international use in sports research.

Population Group: Competitive athletes.

Age Group: Adolescents and Adults (Original SAS); Children (typically 8 years and up) and Adults (SAS-2).

Population Details: The scale is applicable to male and female athletes participating across various sports disciplines (including individual and team sports) and different competitive skill levels, ranging from amateur to elite.

Test Methodology: Respondents are instructed to rate how frequently they typically experience the described feelings or thoughts before or during competitive events. Scores are calculated by summing the responses for the individual subscales, which yields separate scores for Worry, Concentration Disruption, and Somatic Trait Anxiety, in addition to a cumulative total anxiety score.

Keywords

Sport performance, Likert scale, Psychological assessment, Competitive behavior, Anxiety measurement, Sport-specific instrument, Trait measure.

Authors

Author ORCID Identifier: Information not provided in the source material.

Affiliation Email addresses: Information not provided in the source material.

Correspondence Address: Information not provided in the source material.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The original Sport Anxiety Scale (SAS) was developed and published in 1990. The revised and widely adopted version, the Sport Anxiety Scale-2 (SAS-2), was published in 2006. The scale is frequently utilized in non-commercial academic research settings globally.

For specific details regarding licensing, commercial use fees, or formal permissions, interested parties should contact the primary author, Ronald E. Smith, or the publishers of the foundational articles (specifically Anxiety Research and the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology). The instrument can also be referenced online, for instance, via the ResearchGate link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247496718.

Reference’s

The following references document the development and validation of the SAS and SAS-2:

• Smith, Ronald E., Smoll, Frank L. & Schutz, Robert W. (1990). Measurement and correlates of sport-specific cognitive and somatic trait anxiety: The sport anxiety scale. Anxiety Research, 2(4), 263-280.
• Smith, R.E., Smoll, F.L., Cumming, S.P., & Grossbard, J.R. (2006). Measurement of multidimensional sport performance anxiety in children and adults: The Sport Anxiety Scale-2. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 28, 479-501.
• Smith, R.E., Smoll, F.L., Cumming, S.P., (2007). Effects of a Motivational Climate Intervention for Coaches on Young Athletes’ Sport Performance Anxiety. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 29, 39-59.
• Additional non-journal information about the scale is available at: http://www.topendsports.com/psychology/sas.htm.

Items of the Sport Anxiety Scale (SAS)

Original 21-Item SAS (1990)

The response scale is: 1=Not At All, 2=Somewhat, 3=Moderately So, 4=Very Much So

1. I feel nervous
2. During competition, I find myself thinking about unrelated things
3. I have self-doubts
4. My body feels tense
5. I am concerned that I may not do as well in competition as I could
6. My mind wanders during sport competition
7. While performing, I often do not pay attention to what’s going on
8. I feel tense in my stomach
9. Thoughts of doing poorly interfere with my concentration during
10. I’m concerned about choking under pressure
11. My heart races
12. I feel my stomach sinking
13. I’m concerned about performing poorly
14. I have lapses of concentration during competition because of nervousness
15. I sometimes find myself trembling before or during a competitive event
16. I’m worried about reaching my goal
17. My body feels tight
18. I’m concerned that others will be disappointed in my performance
19. My stomach gets upset before or during a competitive event
20. I’m concerned I won’t be able to concentrate
21. My heart pounds before competition

Subscale Scoring (21-Item SAS):

• Worry items: 3, 5, 9, 10, 13, 16, and 18.
• Concentration Disruption items: 2, 6, 7, 14, and 20.
• Somatic Trait Anxiety items: 1, 4, 8, 11, 12, 15, 17, 19, 21.

15-Item Sport Anxiety Scale-2 (SAS-2) Items (2006)

Before or while I compete in sports:

The response scale is: 1= Not At All, 2= A Little Bit, 3= Pretty Much, 4= Very Much

1. It is hard to concentrate on the game.
2. My body feels tense.
3. I worry that I will not play well.
4. It is hard for me to focus on what I am supposed to do.
5. I worry that I will let others down.
6. I feel tense in my stomach.
7. I lose focus on the game.
8. I worry that I will not play my best.
9. I worry that I will play badly.
10. My muscles feel shaky.
11. I worry that I will mess up during the game.
12. My stomach feels upset.
13. I cannot think clearly during the game.
14. My muscles feel tight because I am nervous.
15. I have a hard time focusing on what my coach tells me to do.

Subscale Scoring (15-Item SAS-2):

• Somatic: Items 2, 6, 10, 12, 14.
• Worry: Items 3, 5, 8, 9, 11.
• Concentration Disruption: Items 1, 4, 7, 13, and 15.