Progress toward construct validation of the Self-Presentation in Exercise Questionnaire (SPEQ)

Self-presentation has become an increasingly popular topic in exercise and sport psychology, yet few instruments exist to measure this construct. This paper describes hive validation studies conducted on the Self-Presentation in Exercise Questionnaire (SPEQ), a paper-and-pencil instrument based on Leary and Kowalski's (1990) two-component model of impression management. The SPEQ was designed to assess impression motivation (IM) and impression construction (IC) in exercise environments. The first study employed exploratory factor analysis to reduce a pool of 125 content-representative items to a subset of 41 items forming the hypothesized two-factor model of IM and IC. In the second study, the 41 items were further reduced using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses in separate samples, and the reduced SPEQ also conformed to the IM and IC factor structure. The second study also provided initial evidence to sup port the convergent and discriminant validity of the SPEQ with theoretically salient constructs such as body surveillance, perceived physical ability, physical self-presentation confidence, social desirability, and social physique anxiety.