RESUMO
The aim of this study is to translate, cross-culturally adapt, and validate the Croatian Athlete Psychological Strain Questionnaire (APSQ-Cro) as part of the Sport Mental Health Assessment Tool 1 (SMHAT-1) validation. We assessed the reliability and applicability of the APSQ-Cro among Croatian athletes. The international sports community is increasingly focused on mental health issues in athletes, highlighting the need for early detection tools like the Athlete Psychological Strain Questionnaire (APSQ) and SMHAT-1. We included 869 Croatian competing athletes across 54 sports who received a link to access the WEB-based questionnaire. The Croatian Olympic Board helped in distributing the questionnaires, aiming to reach as many and as diverse a group of registered competing athletes in Croatia as possible. Results showed a Cronbach's alpha of 0.75 for the entire questionnaire, indicating acceptable reliability. An exploratory strategy of factor analysis was used to determine the underlying structure of the APSQ-Cro. For this purpose, the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) test and Bartlett's test for sphericity were performed to ensure the suitability of the data. The KMO test ensured sampling adequacy, with a measure of 0.77 indicating suitability for factor analysis, while Bartlett's test confirmed significant correlations among variables (χ2 = 2779.155, df = 45, p < 0.001), validating the dataset's appropriateness for data reduction techniques. The factor analysis, together with the Cattell scree test and varimax rotation, resulted in a two-factor structure for the APSQ-Cro. Factor 1 included items related to internal psychological struggles, while Factor 2 included items related to external pressures from the athletic environment. These two factors explained 53% of the variability, with Cronbach's alphas of 0.75 and 0.88 for the respective factors. The APSQ-Cro is a valid and reliable tool for assessing distress in Croatian athletes. Croatian athletes' sporting experience will be improved with the broad adoption of the APSQ-Cro, which can help detect early signs of psychological distress and subsequently improve mental health outcomes.
RESUMO
Within the last decade, childhood obesity has become a serious problem, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research paper aimed to examine whether body mass index (BMI) was higher during the pandemic (2020-2022) than in the pre-pandemic period (2012/2013-2019) using trends related to sex, urban-rural area, and physical activity (PA). This study included data from physical examinations of an entire population of primary school children from Split-Dalmatia County (Croatia) over a period of 10 years. There were 103,804 students from the first, fifth, and eighth grades who participated in the analysis. During the pandemic, the BMI of all the students increased, except for eighth-grade girls. Generations of eighth graders have had significantly different BMIs throughout the past decade. We found that first graders were overweight and obese in urban areas, while in rural areas, this problem was experienced by upper grades. Girls were more overweight and obese in the first and eighth grades, but boys experienced this more in the fifth grade. Reduced PA influenced an increase in BMI in both sexes, especially in girls. During the pandemic, this situation became worse. This study could be useful to experts for the creation of new policies for Split-Dalmatia County and surrounding regions that are similar economically and culturally.