Prospective, in-activity and retrospective emotions in physical education: development and validation of three state achievement emotions questionnaires

According to Pekrun et al. (2023), the construct of achievement emotions has been operationalized through three dimensions: (1) valence (i.e., pleasant/unpleasant emotions), (2) arousal (i.e., activating/deactivating emotions), and (3) temporal relation (i.e., prospective, in-activity and retrospective emotions). Based on these three dimensions, Pekrun et al. (2023) has proposed the taxonomy of achievement emotions as a 2 × 2 × 3 dimensional structure. To date, a robust questionnaire is still lacking to measure state achievement emotions in reference to the 2 × 2 × 3 Pekrun’s et al. (2023) model. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to develop three valid and reliable questionnaires measuring students’ prospective, in-activity and retrospective state achievement emotions in physical education. Four stages were followed: (1) based on a literature review on achievement emotions and a committee process validation, preliminary versions of the three questionnaires were built; (2) the factor structures and internal reliabilities were established in a first study with 1159 secondary school students; (3) the factor structures were confirmed by comparing confirmatory factor analyses and exploratory structural equation modeling in a second study with 1019 secondary school students; (4) internal and concurrent validities were assessed with 656 students. The stages followed for the development of the three questionnaires demonstrated strong support for their psychometric properties and factor structures.