THE VALIDITY OF A COMPOSITE OF NINETEEN PERSONALITY VARIABLES IN DIFFERENTIATING BETWEEN AMERICAN WORLD CLASS OLYMPIC CONTENDERS AND UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION

The differential validity of 19 personality variables was examined in a comparison of the affective characteristics of a sample of Ameri-can World Class Olympic contenders (N = 48) with those of a group of undergraduate education majors (N = 63). A two-group discrimi-nant analysis yielded a canonical correlation of.58 (p <.01). Multi-variate analysis of variance (MANOVA) provided a multivanate F calculated to be 2.38 (df = 19 and 91) significant at the.01 level. The analysis revealed that the variables predicted group membership with 83.8 % and 69.8 % accuracy, respectively, for the American World Class Olympic contenders and education undergraduates. The conclusion was that the composite of affective measures exhib-ited promising validity, although cross-validation studies are very much needed. It was also concluded that American World Class contenders appeared to be reserved, intellectual, critical, aloof, con-servative, and traditional as compared to undergraduate education majors who tended to be outgoing, easy going, and liberal. More-over, the undergraduates appeared to be more humble, mild, tough-minded, adaptable, group dependent, and relaxed, whereas the ath-letes seemed to be more aggressive, stubborn, tender-minded, self-sufficient, and tense. EDUCATIONAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL MEASUREMENT 1979, 39 A modest amount of research relative to personality characteristics of various athletes including marathon runners, world-champion and at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 12, 2016epm.sagepub.comDownloaded from 978 EDUCATIONAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL MEASUREMENT American World Class wrestlers, college football and basketball play-ers, and swimmers has been completed during recent years (Coffman