Adopting the Situation in School Questionnaire to Examine Physical Education Teachers’ Motivating and Demotivating Styles Using a Circumplex Approach

Grounded in SDT, several studies have highlighted the role of teachers’ motivating and demoti-vating styles for students’ motivation, learning, and physical activity in physical education (PE). However, most of these studies focused on a restricted number of motivating strategies (e.g., of-fering choice) or dimensions (e.g., autonomy support). Recently, researchers have developed the Situation In School (i.e. SIS) questionnaire which allows to gain a more integrative and fine-grained insight in teachers’ engagement in autonomy-support, structure, control and chaos through a circular structure (i.e., a circumplex). Although teaching in PE resembles teaching in academic courses in many ways, some of the items of the original situation-based questionnaire (e.g. regarding homework) are irrelevant to the PE context. In the present study, we therefore sought to develop a modified, PE-friendly version of this earlier validated SIS-questionnaire, the SIS-PE. Findings in a sample of Belgian (N=136) and French (N=259) PE teachers, examined to-gether and as independent samples, showed that the variation in PE teachers’ motivating styles in this adapted version is also best captured by a circumplex structure, with four overarching styles and eight subareas differing in their level of need support and directiveness. The SIS-PE possesses excellent convergent and concurrent validity. With the adaptations being successful, great opportunities for future research on PE teachers (de-)motivating styles are created.