The Development of a Decision Making Instrument for Soccer

The goal of this project was to develop a reliable decision-making instrument with improved validity compared to other instruments used to date. A methodological design, consisting of two phases, was adopted to develop a valid and reliable instrument. In the first phase, 59 decision making video clips were developed. Content validity was assessed based on the review by expert soccer players. Finally, the basic format of the test was established based upon item discrimination, item-to-total correlation, and item difficulty index computed on 16 experts and 16 novices responses to the clips. Item discrimination and item-to-total correlation were used to exclude clips from the pool of clips. After clips were excluded, the 28 final clips were grouped in four forms based on level of difficulty. In phase two, the reliability of the four forms of the test was determined based on alternate forms reliability and coefficient alpha values. Six Pearson Product Correlations were computed. None of the correlations reached .7 indicating the forms could not be used interchangeably. Estimated internal consistency of each of the four forms based on Cronbach's alpha values was also low. More reliability information must be gathered before this instrument is used in actual experiments