Measuring coach attitudes toward toxic coaching practice in youth sport: Initial validation of the ATCPM-6

Coaches play an integral role in shaping the youth sport environment, either fostering positive experiences or perpetuating harmful climates. While recent literature has increasingly emphasized coaches’ beliefs and attitudes that support positive youth development, less attention has been directed toward understanding coaches’ attitudes towards the type of toxic practices that are more likely to cause harm to youth participants. Understanding, and shifting, these toxic attitudes, which may prevent coaches from adopting positive coaching strategies, may be important to changing coach behavior to support athlete well-being. To address this, we have developed a new scale to measure coaches’ attitudes towards toxic coaching practices in the youth sport context. These toxic practices are defined as those that reinforce win-at-all-costs norms in sport at the expense of youth athlete well-being. The scale was developed as part of a larger project to measure coach attitudes pre- and post- an online training, for which theoretically grounded items were developed through a modified Delphi process. The present study evaluated initial psychometrics evidence for this subscale using Item Response Theory (IRT). The resulting 6-item Attitudes toward Toxic Coaching Practice Measure (ATCPM-6) demonstrated strong measurement precision for low to moderate ratings on the target construct and showed no evidence of Differential Item Functioning (DIF) by coach gender or coaching experience. The current version of ATCPM-6 offers a concise, context-sensitive tool for future research and coach development aimed at safeguarding athlete safety and well-being.