Paper vs. Pixel: Can We Use a Pen-and-Paper Method to Measure Athletes' Implicit Doping Attitude?

Abstract

Doping attitude is an individual’s subjective evaluation (e.g., good or bad, useful or useless) toward the use of prohibited performance-enhancing substances or methods in sports. Research on doping attitude has traditionally relied on self-report questionnaire methods to measure the construct (Ntoumanis et al., 2014; Chan et al., 2015). However, as doping in sport is illegal (World AntiDoping Agency, 2015) and perceived as socially unacceptable, athletes who hold positive attitudes toward doping are less likely to reveal them to others. As a result explicit measures of doping attitude are susceptible to potential bias as athletes may respond in a socially desirable fashion (Petróczi and Aidman, 2009; Gucciardi et al., 2010). To counter such bias, implicit measures such as the implicit association test (IAT; Greenwald et al., 1998) have been developed to capture individuals’ non-conscious attitudes toward doping (Brand et al., 2014a,b; Schindler et al., 2015). The current paper aims to introduce a paper-and-pen IAT which could potentially serve as alternative method to the traditional computer-IAT for measuring athletes’ doping attitude.