Athletic Coping Skills Inventory (ACSI-28)

Developed within a sports psychology framework, the ACSI-28 evaluates seven distinct but related dimensions of psychological coping skills:

1. Coping with Adversity – assesses the ability to remain positive and enthusiastic during competition despite unfavourable situations, maintaining emotional control and bouncing back quickly from mistakes and setbacks.
2. Peaking Under Pressure – measures how athletes respond to competitive pressure situations, including whether they perceive pressure as a challenge rather than a threat and their ability to perform well under pressure.
3. Goal Setting/Mental Preparation – evaluates the athlete’s tendency to set specific performance goals, plan, and mentally prepare for competition.
4. Concentration – assesses the ability to focus on the task at hand and maintain attention during both training and competition, even when faced with distractions or adverse situations.
5. Freedom from Worry – measures the tendency to avoid putting pressure on oneself through excessive worry about performing poorly, making mistakes, or concern about others’ perceptions.
6. Confidence and Achievement Motivation – evaluates confidence levels and motivation, particularly the tendency to give 100% during practice and competition and work consistently to improve skills.
7. Coachability – assesses openness to instruction, willingness to learn from coaches, and the ability to accept constructive criticism without taking it personally or becoming upset.

For sports psychologists, the ACSI-28 offers several distinct advantages, particularly in understanding how psychological factors may contribute to athletic performance. Research demonstrates that psychological skills—not merely physical talent—play a crucial role in athletic success (Christensen & Smith, 2018). The ACSI-28 has been shown to predict performance in various sports, including baseball (Kimbrough et al., 2007), volleyball (Belem et al., 2014), extreme sports (Young & Knight, 2014) and team sports (Belem et al., 2014; Özcan, 2021).

The ACSI-28 aids in assessment, treatment planning, and intervention evaluation. As an assessment tool, it helps identify patterns of psychological strengths and weaknesses that may affect performance, facilitating a more nuanced approach to case conceptualisation. This can be particularly valuable when working with athletes who demonstrate discrepancies between their physical abilities and actual performance outcomes (Christensen & Smith, 2018).

In treatment planning, specific dimensional scores on the ACSI-28 may indicate the need for targeted interventions addressing particular aspects of psychological performance. For example, low scores on Concentration might suggest the need for attention training, while deficits in Coping with Adversity could point to the benefits of stress management training. Recent research has demonstrated that psychological skills, as measured by the ACSI-28, can effectively “level the playing field” by reducing the influence of disparities in physical talent (Christensen & Smith, 2018).

During consultations, understanding an athlete’s ACSI-28 profile can inform the focus of interventions. Research has shown positive correlations between athletes’ coping skills and their engagement in sports activities (Özcan, 2021), suggesting that effective psychological coping strategies enhance not only performance but also commitment to sport.

The ACSI-28 has demonstrated value across diverse populations, from collegiate athletes to elite competitors. The ACSI-28 is one of the most psychometrically sound instruments available for assessing athletic coping skills (Pereira et al., 2020), making it a valuable tool for sports psychologists seeking to understand and enhance the psychological aspects of athletic performance.

The Athletic Coping Skills Inventory (ACSI-28) scores consist of a total score (between 0 and 84) and scores for each of the seven subscales (raw score between 0 and 12). Higher scores represent higher levels of psychological skills and coping strategies. Scores are provided for the following subscales of the ACSI-28:

1. Coping with Adversity (Items 5, 17, 21, and 24) – assesses the ability to remain positive and enthusiastic during competition despite unfavourable situations, maintaining emotional control and bouncing back quickly from mistakes and setbacks.
2. Peaking Under Pressure (Items 6, 18, 22, and 28) – measures how athletes respond to competitive pressure situations, including whether they perceive pressure as a challenge rather than a threat and their ability to perform well under pressure.
3. Goal Setting/Mental Preparation (Items 1, 8, 13, and 20) – evaluates the athlete’s tendency to set specific performance goals, plan, and mentally prepare for competition.
4. Concentration (Items 4, 11, 16, and 25) – assesses the ability to focus on the task at hand and maintain attention during both training and competition, even when faced with distractions or adverse situations.
5. Freedom from Worry (Items 7, 12, 19, and 23, all reverse scored) – measures the tendency to avoid putting pressure on oneself through excessive worry about performing poorly, making mistakes, or concern about others’ perceptions.
6. Confidence and Achievement Motivation (Items 2, 9, 14, and 26) – evaluates confidence levels and motivation, particularly the tendency to give 100% during practice and competition and work consistently to improve skills.
7. Coachability (Items 3R, 10R, 15, and 27) – assesses openness to instruction, willingness to learn from coaches, and the ability to accept constructive criticism without taking it personally or becoming upset.

In addition, scores are presented as percentile ranks, where a percentile of 50 indicates the typical score compared to 1,027 male and female athletes (Smith et al., 1995). These percentile ranks are used to derive descriptive categories that aid in clinical interpretation. The descriptive categories for each subscale and the total score are:

• Low (16th percentile or below): Indicates significantly less psychological skills and coping strategies than most other athletes.
• Average (17th to 83rd percentile): Indicates a typical level of psychological skills and coping strategies compared to other athletes.
• High (84th percentile or above): Indicates significantly more psychological skills and coping strategies than other athletes.

On first administration a plot is presented displaying the ACSI-28 total and the subscale percentiles. The percentiles are presented with the qualitative descriptors in the background for ease of interpretation. When administered on multiple occasions, a longitudinal plot is displayed showing the subscale percentiles over time. When ACSI-28 scores are available from multiple timepoints, changes in scores can provide valuable information about the effectiveness of interventions or developmental changes in psychological skills and coping strategies. For comparative interpretation, changes of at least 0.5 standard deviations in raw scores are considered clinically meaningful (the minimally important difference) (Norman et al., 2003; Turner et al., 2010). When interpreting changes, attention should be paid to both the total score and the patterns of change across subscales.

The ACSI-28 was developed through a four-phase process involving exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses with multiple samples of athletes. Developed from the 42-item ACSI (Smith & Smoll, 1991), the final 28-item version was established through confirmatory factor analysis strongly supporting the seven-dimension structure of the ACSI-28 (CFI = .91, RMSEA = .044) (Smith et al., 1995). These seven factors accounted for 53% of the variance for males and 58% for females. Follow-up principal component analyses confirmed the dimensional validity for both male and female athletes (Smith et al., 1995).

The internal consistency of the ACSI-28 has been demonstrated, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the total scale (α = 0.86) and individual subscales showing good reliability: Coping with Adversity (α = 0.66), Peaking Under Pressure (α = 0.78), Goal Setting/Mental Preparation (α = 0.71), Concentration (α = 0.62), Freedom from Worry (α = 0.76), Confidence and Achievement Motivation (α = 0.66), and Coachability (α = 0.72) (Smith et al., 1995). Subsequent studies have produced similar reliability coefficients, supporting the consistency of the measure across diverse athlete populations (Bourgeois et al., 2003; Young & Knight, 2014).

Test-retest reliability coefficients, calculated from a sample of 94 male and female college-age athletes after one week, ranged from .47 (Coachability) to .87 (Peaking Under Pressure) for the seven subscales, with the Personal Coping Resources total score demonstrating strong stability (r = .87) (Smith et al., 1995). The majority of the subscales (five of seven) demonstrated test-retest coefficients exceeding .70, indicating good temporal stability.

Construct validity of the ACSI-28 is supported by its theoretically consistent relationships with measures of psychological distress and wellbeing. The ACSI-28 demonstrates significant correlations with Rosenbaum’s (1980) Self-Control Schedule (r = .44), which measures cognitive-behavioral coping skills, and Coppel’s (1980) Self-Efficacy Scale (r = .58), which measures generalised behavioral self-efficacy (Smith et al., 1995). Discriminant validity is demonstrated through the correlations with the Sport Anxiety Scale (SAS). As expected, the Freedom From Worry subscale shows a substantial negative relation (r = -.59) with the SAS worry factor, but lower correlations with the somatic anxiety or concentration disruption factors (Smith et al., 1995). The ACSI-28 total score correlates -.43 with the SAS total score, supporting the theoretical relationship between coping skills and competitive anxiety.

Of particular note for psychologists, research indicates that different dimensions of athletic coping skills show different patterns of relationships with performance outcomes. For example, in a study of professional baseball players, the ACSI-28 subscales predicted performance and career survival, with the Confidence and Achievement Motivation subscale being the strongest predictor of batting (.34) and pitching (.33) performance (Smith et al., 1995). These findings suggest that the ACSI-28 subscales can be used independently to provide targeted insight into specific psychological skills.

For clinical interpretation, ACSI-28 scores are typically evaluated dimensionally, with higher average scores indicating greater psychological coping skills in specific domains. Based on the combined sample (N = 1,024; 594 male and 433 female varsity athletes) from Smith et al. (1995), the following means and standard deviations provide reference points for interpretation:

• Coping with Adversity: M = 6.26, SD = 2.23
• Peaking Under Pressure: M = 6.40, SD = 2.87
• Goal Setting/Mental Preparation: M = 5.48, SD = 2.75
• Concentration: M = 7.02, SD = 2.19
• Freedom from Worry: M = 6.46, SD = 2.82
• Confidence and Achievement Motivation: M = 7.86, SD = 2.28
• Coachability: M = 8.87, SD = 2.43
• Total Personal Coping Resources: M = 48.35, SD = 9.64

These means and standard deviations are used to create percentiles which are then NovoPsych used these to create descriptive categories for each subscale and the total score:

• Low (16th percentile or below): Indicates significantly less psychological skills and coping strategies than most other athletes.
• Average (17th to 83rd percentile): Indicates a typical level of psychological skills and coping strategies compared to other athletes.
• High (84th percentile or above): Indicates significantly more psychological skills and coping strategies than other athletes.

The relationship between ACSI-28 scores and social desirability has been examined in several studies. Correlations with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale range from .19 to .33 for the subscales (Smith et al., 1995), with the total score correlating .43 with social desirability (Smith et al., 1995). While these correlations are not remarkably high compared to other non-pathological scales, they do suggest that impression management may influence ACSI-28 responses to some degree. However, subsequent research by Bourgeois et al. (2003) found correlations with the Balanced Inventory of Desired Responding (BIDR; Paulhaus, 1988) to be much lower than the correlations found by Smith et al. (1995). Although most ACSI-28 subscales were significantly correlated with impression management, the maximum correlation observed (with Coachability r = 0.18) accounted for only 3% of the variance between the two variables. All ACSI-28 subscales were significantly related to self-deception (Bourgeois et al., 2003), but as individuals scoring higher on self-deception are better adjusted than are individuals with lower self-deception scores (Verkasalo and Lindeman, 1994) and measures of self-deception appear to “reflect a positively biased, psychologically well-adjusted, self-presentation” (Barrick & Mount, 1996, p. 262), this could be a normative relationship between ACSI-28 scores and self-deception. 

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