Edinburgh Napier University

  The quality of the talent development environment and how it supports youth athletes has been identified as one major factor of success. Nonetheless, in psychological talent assessment there is a lack of standardized instruments addressing environmental aspects. One well-known questionnaire is the Talent Development Environment Questionnaire (TDEQ - Martindale et al., 2010). Until recently, the TDEQ had been translated into several languages, but not into German. Within this study, the five-factor, 25-item TDEQ-5 (Li et al., 2015) was systematically forward and backward translated and administered to 276 German youth athletes from different sports, aged between 13 and 21years ( M = 16.01; SD = 2.1). In addition, 63 of these athletes
completed both the German and English TDEQ-5 to test for quality of translation. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the five-factor structure was acceptable according to the chi-square to degrees of freedom ratio (1.9), root mean square error of approximation (.058), and standardized root mean square (.061). The comparative fit index (CFI) of .88 was slightly below the .90 cut-off value. The reliability scores of the
TDEQ-5 factors were considered moderate to satisfactory (α = .62 to .75). In conclusion, the German TDEQ-5 appears to be an applicable tool for use in research and applied settings but needs further analysis. In particular, we encourage future research to test the construct validity and ecological validity of the German TDEQ-5 and applied practitioners to utilize the tool to test and drive applied interventions within similar talent development environments.