Study 1: Scale Development

confounded by approach vs. avoidance motivation (Elliot, 1999) or gain vs. loss framing (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981). A summary of the deletions is included in Appendix A.

The remaining item pool comprises 33 items (17 for task SC and 16 for ego SC).

These items are independently reviewed by a panel of three graduate students to confirm content validity and to make revisions in order to further improve comprehensibility.

The goal of Study 1 is to further reduce the number of items by means of exploratory factor analysis. More specifically, I aim at a brief scale with five items for measuring ego and task SC, respectively, with an alpha between .80 and .90 for each subscale (Clark & Watson, 1995; Newby & Klein, 2014). A concise scale is particularly important for measuring

situationally dependent states, as a state might fade in the course of completing a long

questionnaire. A scale of ten items is short enough to be administered during a contest. As the ego and task SC are usually considered in tandem and as they constitute specific forms of more general state competitiveness, ego and task SC are reflected in two subscales of one instrument, rather than two separate instruments (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988).

3.1. Materials and Methods

The remaining 33 items are administered to a sample of 199 subjects (103 women, 96 men) recruited from the online platform Amazon Mechanical Turk. Being an American resident is a prerequisite for participating in the study. Participants are between 21 and 73 years old, with a mean age of 37 (sd=11). All participants give informed consent to the study.

S bjec an e ma be bia ed o a d mo e ociall de i able an e (Nederhof, 1985). To rule out this possibility for the current sample, participants complete the Social Desirability Index (SDS-17; Newby & Klein, 2014; Stöber, 2001).

To provide participants with a setting and put them in a competitive state, they are asked to read a scenario description of a contest and envision participating in that contest.

Previous research has successfully employed this approach in developing scales for situationally dependent concepts (Nichols, 2012). Participants are given one out of three possible scenarios all of them involve an actor who participates in a contest with a number of colleagues. The scenario descriptions are provided in Appendix B. After reading and envisioning the scenario, subjects complete the 33 state competitiveness items. The items are answered in three blocks and subjects are reminded of the scenario between the blocks.

Responses are submitted on 7-point answer scales ranging f om comple el di ag ee o comple el ag ee (Matell & Jacoby, 1972). Lastly, subjects complete the SDS-17, are

debriefed, and are given the chance to leave comments in a textbox. Completing the study takes an average of 15 minutes, and subjects receive $2.25 for their participation.

3.2. Results and Discussion

3.2.1. Exploratory Factor Analysis

The 33 items are submitted to an exploratory factor analysis to examine the extent to which items fall into the two factors ego and task SC, as well as to reduce the number of items.

Factors are extracted based on the principal-factor estimation method (Worthington &

Whittaker, 2006). In line with the two-dimensional account of state competitiveness, the maximum number of factors to be retained is restricted to two corresponding to ego and task SC. A scree test yields support for the two-factor structure (Cattell, 1966; the scree plot is provided in Appendix C).

To ease interpretation of the components, I employ promax rotation. As an oblique rotation method, promax allows the factors to be correlated. A correlation of ego and task SC is expected as both indicate a motivation to exert effort in contests. Indeed, the retained factors at this point correlate with r = .27. The rotated factor loadings of the 33 items are depicted in Appendix D (top panel).

The item reduction procedure is completed in two phases. In the first phase, I delete items that appear grossly misplaced in terms of factor loadings and cross-loadings. I remove three items that load on the wrong factor, six more that have high cross-loadings, and three items due to overall low loadings. This yields a promax-rotated solution in which all 21 items (11 task and 10 ego) load between .6 and .8 on the target factor and between .2 and .2 on the other factor (see Appendix D, middle panel). While this is a satisfactory factor structure, the goal is to develop a shorter scale. Therefore, more items are deleted in a second phase of item reduction.

In the second phase of item reduction, I consider not only factor loadings but also item content. Deleting items solely on the basis of factor loadings would yield a highly reliable scale, however, the retained items would be likely to be redundant, thereby

compromising he cale alidi (Clark & Watson, 1995). Hence, I delete one item at a time and examine the plot of rotated factor loadings after each deletion. At the same time, I

consider, for example, deleting items that are rather similar in content. The result of this stepwise item-deletion procedure is a 10-item scale with 5 items per factor, as outlined in Table 2. As stated earlier, a scale length of five items per factor is appropriate for a simple

concept such as ego/task SC (Clark & Watson, 1995). The rotated factor loadings are displayed in Table 2 and graphically plotted in Appendix D (bottom panel).

Table 2. Rotated factor loadings of the final solution.

Item Factor 1:

Task SC

Factor 2:

Ego SC (12) My goal today is to get better than I was before. .78

(17) I see this contest as a possibility to prove something to myself.

.74 (22) This activity helps me to develop my abilities. .83 (26) I value the other contestants for motivating me to bring the

best out of myself.

.69 (33) I find this competition a valuable means of learning about

myself and others. .74

(39) A success would be to do better than the others rather than just getting a good result.

.74

(51) I enjoy beating the others in this. .73

(58) Right now, winning is the most important thing to me. .78

(59) I want the others to lose now. .64

(81) Success in this task would make me feel superior to the others.

.76 Note: Factor loadings < |.15| are omitted. Rotation method: oblique promax.

The ego and task SC subscales display good internal consistencies (alpha = .86 and 88, respectively). All average interitem correlations for the two scales fall between .52 and .62, suggesting appropriate unidimensionality of the two subscales (Clark & Watson, 1995).

The task and ego SC factors correlate with r = .29. The positive correlation suggests a slight tendency for people who experience either ego or task SC tend to experience the respective other form as well. This is only a small tendency; the correlation coefficient is not

particularly large. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile noting what is not shown, namely a negative correlation. Experiencing ego SC does not imply that task SC is absent. This result is

interesting in view of the fact that previous research does not agree on the correlation between ego and task TC. In this study, ego and task TC correlate positively (see also Tassi

& Schneider, 1997), however, other studies find a negative (Franken & Brown, 1995) or no correlation (Ryckman et al., 1997). Again, for ego and task SC as measured in this study, there is a very small positive correlation.

To sum up, the exploratory factor analysis yields a brief and face valid instrument for measuring ego and task SC. Five of the retained items represent the key aspects of ego SC, i.e., the emphasis on winning, a need to demonstrate superiority, and a denigrating view of the opponent. The other five items represent the key aspects of task SC, i.e., an emphasis on personal improvement, ascribing meaningfulness to the task, and an appreciation of the competitors. While the factor structure appears to be face valid, this should be empirically substantiated with a confirmatory factor analysis based on a new sample (DiStefano & Hess, 2005; Worthington & Whittaker, 2006). This will be addressed in Study 2.

3.2.2. Social desirability

As is customary in scale development, I check whether answers to the state competitiveness scale are biased by socially desirable responding (Stöber, 2001). There is no significant correlation between social desirability and the ego SC subscale. For task SC, there is a significant but very small correlation of r = .16 (p < .05). Like Newby and Klein (2014), I also verify that each state competitiveness item correlates higher with its scale (task or ego SC, correlations between .75 and .87) than with social desirability (all correlations < |.2|).

Taken together, thus, the answers to the state competitiveness items do not appear to be driven by social desirability concerns.