Examining the ecological validity of the Talent Development Environment Questionnaire

It is clear that high class expertise and effective practice exists within many talent development environments across the world. However, there is also a general consensus that widespread evidence-based policy and practice is lacking. As such, it is crucial to develop solutions which can facilitate effective dissemination of knowledge and promotion of evidence-based talent development systems. While the Talent Development Environment Questionnaire (Martindale et al., 2010 ) provides a method through which this could be facilitated, its ecological validity has remained untested. As such, this study aimed to investigate the real world applicability of the questionnaire through discriminant function analysis. Athletes across ten distinct regional squads and academies were identified and separated into two broad levels, 'higher quality' (n = 48) and 'lower quality' (n = 51) environments, based on their process quality and productivity. Results revealed that the Talent Development Environment Questionnaire was able to discriminate with 77.8% accuracy. Furthermore, in addition to the questionnaire as a whole, two individual features, 'quality preparation' (P < 0.01) and 'understanding the athlete' (P < 0.01), were found to be significant discriminators. In conclusion, the results indicate robust structural properties and sound ecological validity, allowing the questionnaire to be used with more confidence in applied and research settings.