Coping Inventory for Paralympic Athletes in Competition Situations (ICAP)

1. Abstract

The Coping Inventory for Paralympic Athletes in Competition Situations (known by its Portuguese acronym ICAP — Inventário de Coping para Atletas Paralímpicos em Situação de Competição) is a domain-specific, multidimensional psychometric instrument formulated to evaluate the self-regulatory and coping strategies deployed by athletes with physical and visual impairments during high-stakes athletic competition. Grounded in the Motivational Theory of Coping (MTC) articulated by Skinner and colleagues, the inventory operationalizes coping as an action regulation process responding to stressful encounters that threaten or challenge fundamental psychological needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Originally drafted as an expansive 95-item protocol, the instrument was systematically refined through rigorous expert committee evaluation and pilot testing among elite Brazilian Paralympic athletes aged 18 and older, culminating in a standardized 91-item measurement model.

The ICAP measures twelve distinct dimensions of coping distributed symmetrically across basic psychological needs, spanning both adaptive (approach-oriented or accommodation) and maladaptive (disengagement, submission, opposition) behavioral, emotional, and cognitive patterns: Self-Reliance, Support-Seeking, Problem-Solving, Information-Seeking, Accommodation, Negotiation, Delegation, Social Isolation, Helplessness, Escape, Submission, and Opposition. Psychometric investigations conducted by Bertoldi et al. (2023) confirmed robust content validity, utilizing Hernandez-Nieto’s Content Validity Coefficient (CVC). Across clarity, practical relevance, and theoretical representativeness, 91 of the 95 evaluated items met or exceeded the strict cutoff criterion of $CVC ge 0.80$. The inventory can be administered via electronic or pen-and-paper formats, presenting a critical evaluation framework for sport psychologists, classified para-athletes, national sports federations, and rehabilitation professionals endeavoring to understand psychological resilience, competitive stress management, and athletic performance optimization under severe competition-specific physical and structural constraints.

2. Keywords

Paralympic athletes, Coping Inventory for Paralympic Athletes in Competition Situations, ICAP, Motivational Theory of Coping, sport psychology, physical impairment, visual impairment, competitive stress, content validity, self-regulation.

3. Authors

The Coping Inventory for Paralympic Athletes in Competition Situations (ICAP) was developed by an interdisciplinary team of Brazilian researchers specialized in sport psychology, psychometrics, adapted physical activity, and human movement sciences:

• Rafaela Bertoldi, Ph.D. — Human Movement Sciences Graduate Program, School of Physical Education, Physiotherapy and Dance, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil. ORCID: 0000-0001-9201-0131. Email: [email protected].
• Mônia Aparecida da Silva, Ph.D. — Graduate Program in Psychology, Universidade Federal de São João del-Rei (UFSJ), São João del-Rei, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
• Paulo Felipe Ribeiro Bandeira, Ph.D. — Department of Physical Education, Universidade Regional do Cariri (URCA), Crato, Ceará, Brazil.
• Denise Ruschel Bandeira, Ph.D. — Graduate Program in Psychology, Institute of Psychology, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil. ORCID: 0000-0001-9867-2718.
• Janice Zarpellon Mazo, Ph.D. — Human Movement Sciences Graduate Program, School of Physical Education, Physiotherapy and Dance, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the ICAP is to systematically map, categorize, and quantify the multifaceted coping strategies mobilized by para-athletes with physical impairments (e.g., amputations, spinal cord injuries, cerebral palsy) and visual impairments (e.g., partial sight, total blindness) during competitive athletic situations. While mainstream sport psychology has produced numerous general and sport-specific coping assessments—such as the Coping Style in Sport Survey (CSSS), the Athletic Coping Skills Inventory (ACSI-28), and the Modified COPE—these historical tools were calibrated predominantly on able-bodied athletic populations. Consequently, they routinely overlook the unique intersectional stressors encountered by disabled sportspeople, including classification anxiety, technical assistive equipment malfunctions (e.g., prostheses, racing wheelchairs, tethering guides), structural accessibility limitations, and disability-related stigma or prejudice.

By tailoring item stems and behavioral markers specifically to competition contexts in adapted sports, the ICAP serves several critical clinical, applied, and research applications:

• Diagnostic Assessment in Applied Sport Psychology: The ICAP enables applied practitioners to generate nuanced individual profiles of an athlete’s coping repertoire before, during, and after major competitive events. Practitioners can identify whether an athlete habitually leans on maladaptive reactions (e.g., Helplessness, Social Isolation, Submission) when faced with referee bias, physical discomfort, or strategic failure, thereby guiding personalized cognitive-behavioral or acceptance-based interventions.
• Need-Supportive Coaching Design: By indexing how stressors relate to the basic psychological needs of Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness, the tool informs coaches, guide runners, and support personnel on how to structure motivational climates that foster adaptive strategies like Self-Reliance, Problem-Solving, and Support-Seeking.
• Empirical Research in Adapted Physical Activity: The instrument addresses an empirical gap in international parasport literature by providing an operationally valid tool for cross-sectional, longitudinal, and interventional investigations examining the interaction between stress appraisals, personality constructs, functional classification categories, and athletic performance outcomes.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct captured by the ICAP is coping in competitive sports settings, operationalized through the twelve multidimensional families of coping defined by the Motivational Theory of Coping. Coping is not viewed merely as static trait-like defenses or transient states, but as dynamic “action regulations under stress.” Each family reflects how an athlete marshals their cognitive, emotional, and behavioral resources when competitive situations threaten or support their fundamental psychological needs.

Autonomy-Focused Dimensions

Autonomy pertains to self-determination, the feeling of volition, and agency over one’s competitive destiny. When autonomy is challenged or threatened, athletes mobilize four distinct coping strategies:

• Self-Reliance (Adaptive Approach): Reflects self-regulation through emotional composure, self-encouragement, and active internal determination. The athlete draws upon inner emotional equilibrium and focused cognitive framing without external guidance (e.g., maintaining focus via positive self-talk following an unexpected performance error).
• Support-Seeking (Adaptive Approach): Involves actively seeking instrumental, emotional, or informational backing from teammates, coaches, guides, or sport psychologists to protect autonomous functioning under acute competitive stress.
• Delegation (Maladaptive Disengagement): Defined by the abdication of personal control and behavioral agency, transferring the responsibility of decision-making and performance entirely onto coaches, equipment, or external circumstances.
• Social Isolation (Maladaptive Disengagement): Characterized by intentional withdrawal from one’s athletic social network, refusing contact with teammates or staff, and internalizing distress in a manner that obstructs autonomous functioning.

Competence-Focused Dimensions

Competence reflects the athlete’s perceived mastery, technical self-efficacy, and execution capability in competitive trials. Threatened competence elicits four coping behaviors:

• Problem-Solving (Adaptive Approach): Cognitive and behavioral actions aimed at directly eliminating, circumventing, or modifying the competitive source of stress (e.g., adjusting tactical plans against an unanticipated competitor strategy or recalibrating technical gear).
• Information-Seeking (Adaptive Approach): Systematic gathering of pertinent tactical, environmental, or situational data to resolve ambiguity and restore competence (e.g., observing rivals’ maneuvers, consulting lane conditions, or reviewing rule classifications).
• Helplessness (Maladaptive Disengagement): Cognitive and behavioral capitulation marked by perceived lack of control, defeatist attribution, and the subjective conviction that personal efforts cannot alter the competitive outcome.
• Escape (Maladaptive Disengagement): Physical or psychological evasion of the stressful stimulus, manifest through mental disengagement, fantasy withdrawal, or seeking premature exit from the competitive arena.

Relatedness-Focused Dimensions

Relatedness encompasses the feeling of mutual belonging, social connection, and safety within the athletic ecosystem. When competitive situations challenge social cohesion and interpersonal bonds, four coping pathways emerge:

• Accommodation (Adaptive Approach): Cognitive reframing, positive reappraisal, and flexible restructuring of one’s expectations to align harmoniously with unavoidable competitive realities (e.g., accepting an unfavorable lane draw while maintaining competitive spirit).
• Negotiation (Adaptive Approach): Assertive interpersonal communication aimed at reconciling divergent goals or resolving conflicts with officials, teammates, or coaches to maintain relatedness and functional equilibrium.
• Submission (Maladaptive Disengagement): Passive acquiescence and rumination, where the athlete surrenders personal aspirations to appease external expectations, resulting in internalized resentment or emotional fatigue.
• Opposition (Maladaptive Disengagement): Externalized hostility, overt resistance, rule-breaking, or aggressive pushback directed against competitors, referees, or coaching staff when relational stress peaks.

6. Theoretical Framework

The ICAP is explicitly founded upon the Motivational Theory of Coping (MTC), formulated by Ellen A. Skinner, Melanie J. Zimmer-Gembeck, and colleagues (Skinner & Wellborn, 1994; Skinner, Edge, Altman, & Sherwood, 2003; Zimmer-Gembeck & Skinner, 2016). The MTC represents a major theoretical evolution beyond the traditional binary transactional models of coping (e.g., Lazarus & Folkman’s classic dichotomy of problem-focused versus emotion-focused coping), which have been criticized for confounding coping actions with their functional outcomes and failing to reflect developmental and motivational architecture.

The architectural foundation of MTC integrates Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000), positing that human adaptation, resilience, and flourishing are driven by the ongoing satisfaction of three basic psychological needs: Competence, Autonomy, and Relatedness. When an individual encounters stressful environmental demands, these demands are subjectively appraised not merely as abstract cognitive evaluations, but as direct challenges or threats to one or more of these needs.

Under the MTC, coping responses are organized into a hierarchical architecture comprising:

1. Basic Psychological Needs: The fundamental energetic core (Competence, Autonomy, Relatedness).
2. Action Orientations: Responses categorized by whether they express approach-oriented, constructive action regulations (engagement) or defensive, protective, or disintegrative action regulations (disengagement).
3. Twelve Coping Families: Specific multidimensional behavioral, cognitive, and emotional syndromes that execute adaptation (the 12 subscales of the ICAP).

Within the competitive parasport arena, this framework proves especially informative. A visually impaired sprinter encountering an unexpected mechanical malfunction in their tether or an unstable guide-runner relationship faces simultaneous threats to competence (loss of speed and bodily control) and relatedness (interpersonal friction with the guide). The MTC allows researchers to dissect whether the athlete responds by constructively gathering tactile information and renegotiating verbal signals (Information-Seeking / Negotiation) or defaults to perceived powerlessness and aggression (Helplessness / Opposition).

7. Validity

The construction and validation pipeline of the ICAP followed standard psychometric protocols recommended by the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the American Psychological Association (APA), and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME). Initial validation efforts reported by Bertoldi et al. (2023) focused on establishing rigorous content validity and ecological relevance.

Content Validity Methodology

The initial pool of 95 items was generated through an extensive review of literature on the Motivational Theory of Coping and semi-structured qualitative interviews with competitive Paralympic athletes. The content validity of this 95-item instrument was systematically assessed by an independent panel of expert judges specialized in psychometrics, adapted sports, and sport psychology. Judges evaluated each item across three fundamental criteria:

• Clarity of Language: Linguistic accessibility, comprehensibility, and semantic clarity for adult athletes with diverse educational backgrounds.
• Practical Relevance: The substantive importance and contextual applicability of the item in actual high-performance parasport competition.
• Theoretical Dimension / Representativeness: The degree to which each item unambiguously maps onto its designated MTC theoretical dimension.

Quantitative agreement was established via Hernandez-Nieto’s Content Validity Coefficient (CVC). The mathematical criterion required a minimum threshold of $CVC ge 0.80$ for an item to be retained. Expert ratings demonstrated outstanding alignment: out of the original 95 items, 91 items met or surpassed the stringent $CVC ge 0.80$ cutoff across all three criteria. Only 4 items failed to satisfy the threshold due to ambiguous phrasing or overlapping theoretical boundaries and were subsequently excised. The overall scale CVC index reached values exceeding 0.85, confirming that the retained 91 items accurately reflect the operationalized constructs of the 12 coping dimensions.

Pilot Testing and Face Validity

Following expert review, the refined 91-item inventory underwent empirical pilot testing with a cohort of active Brazilian Paralympic athletes aged 21 to 37 years with physical and visual impairments. Qualitative debriefing sessions and cognitive walkthroughs confirmed strong face validity. Athletes reported that the items mirrored actual tactical, interpersonal, and psychological dilemmas experienced during regional, national, and international competitions.

8. Reliability

In the foundational scale construction and content validation study published by Bertoldi et al. (2023), the investigative team focused specifically on item formulation, theoretical mapping, expert committee agreement, and semantic pilot testing. Consequently, formal quantitative estimates of internal consistency (such as Cronbach’s alpha [$\alpha$] and McDonald’s omega [$\omega$]) and temporal stability (test-retest intraclass correlation coefficients [ICC]) were not reported in that initial publication.

Subsequent psychometric phases by the authors and collaborative sport science laboratories are addressing these metrics in larger, multi-center Paralympic samples. In accordance with contemporary psychometric guidelines for multi-subscale instruments derived from the Motivational Theory of Coping, subsequent studies aim to demonstrate composite reliability coefficients of $rho ge 0.70$ and McDonald’s $\omega ge 0.75$ for each of the 12 individual subscales, while accounting for potential inter-item covariance among related engagement and disengagement clusters.

9. Factor Analysis

At the time of the initial validation report by Bertoldi et al. (2023), full-scale exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) had not yet been finalized. The preliminary structural design relies on deductive theoretical assignment derived from Skinner’s 12-factor motivational taxonomy.

Ongoing large-scale structural validation work on the ICAP involves structural equation modeling (SEM) to verify the hypothesized hierarchical architecture:

• First-Order Factor Model: A 12-factor correlated model specifying each of the distinct coping strategies (Self-Reliance, Support-Seeking, Problem-Solving, Information-Seeking, Accommodation, Negotiation, Delegation, Social Isolation, Helplessness, Escape, Submission, Opposition).
• Higher-Order Hierarchical Model: A dual-tier structure wherein the 12 first-order factors load onto two second-order factors (Adaptive Engagement vs. Maladaptive Disengagement) or three second-order factors organized by basic psychological needs (Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness).
• Measurement Invariance: Evaluating structural, metric, and scalar invariance across athlete sex (male vs. female), impairment category (physical vs. visual impairment), and competitive experience level (national vs. international elite).

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the ICAP are summarized below:

• Test Type: Original multidimensional psychological inventory / self-report questionnaire.
• Target Population: Adult athletes (aged 18 and older, including young adults aged 18–29 and adults aged 30–39+) with physical impairments (e.g., limb loss, spinal cord trauma, neuromotor dysfunction) or visual impairments competing in organized parasports.
• Total Item Count: 91 items (refined from an initial 95-item draft).
• Number of Subscales: 12 dimensions: Self-Reliance, Support-Seeking, Problem-Solving, Information-Seeking, Accommodation, Negotiation, Delegation, Social Isolation, Helplessness, Escape, Submission, Opposition.
• Administration Modality: Available in standard paper-and-pencil formats and accessible electronic platforms (equipped with screen-reader compatibility and high-contrast display options for visually impaired respondents).
• Administration Duration: Approximately 20 to 30 minutes, depending on individual accommodations or accessibility requirements.
• Scoring Format: Standardized Likert-type scaling (ranging typically from 1 [“Never / Rarely”] to 5 [“Always / Almost Always”]), producing subscale-specific mean or summed composite scores. Higher subscale scores denote greater frequency of employing that particular coping strategy during athletic competition.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Year of Development: 2023.
• Commercial Fee: No commercial fee is required. The ICAP is an open-access scientific instrument intended for academic, non-commercial, and clinical sport psychology use.
• Permissions & Usage Inquiries: Researchers, coaches, and clinicians seeking access to the official complete item inventory, Portuguese or translated versions, or scoring documentation must contact the corresponding author:
  • Contact Person: Dr. Rafaela Bertoldi
  • Email: [email protected]
  • Institutional Affiliation: School of Physical Education, Physiotherapy and Dance, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil.

12. References

Bertoldi, R., da Silva, M. A., Ribeiro Bandeira, P. F., Bandeira, D. R., & Mazo, J. Z. (2023). Construction and content validity evidences of Coping Inventory for Brazilian Paralympic Athletes in Competition Situations. International Journal of Disability, Development and Education, 70(5), 885–898. https://doi.org/10.1080/1034912X.2021.1916894

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01

Hernández-Nieto, R. A. (2002). Contributions to statistical analysis: The content validity coefficient and the phi of concordance. Universidad de Los Andes.

Skinner, E. A., Edge, K., Altman, J., & Sherwood, H. (2003). Searching for the structure of coping: A review and critique of category systems for classifying ways of coping. Psychological Bulletin, 129(2), 216–269. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.129.2.216

Skinner, E. A., & Wellborn, J. G. (1994). Coping during childhood and adolescence: A motivational perspective. In D. L. Featherman, R. M. Lerner, & M. Perlmutter (Eds.), Life-span development and behavior (Vol. 12, pp. 91–133). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Zimmer-Gembeck, M. J., & Skinner, E. A. (2016). The development of coping: Stress, neurobiology, and adaptation during childhood, adolescence, and emerging adulthood. In D. Cicchetti (Ed.), Developmental psychopathology: Risk, resilience, and psychopathology (3rd ed., Vol. 4, pp. 585–640). John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119125556.devpsy414

13. Items of the Scale