TY - INPR A1 - Petroczi, Andrea A1 - Backhouse, Susan H. A1 - Barkoukis, Vassilis A1 - Brand, Ralf A1 - Elbe, Anne-Marie A1 - Lazuras, Larnbros A1 - Lucidi, Fabio T1 - A call for policy guidance on psychometric testing in doping control in sport T2 - International journal of drug policy N2 - One of the fundamental challenges in anti-doping is identifying athletes who use, or are at risk of using, prohibited performance enhancing substances. The growing trend to employ a forensic approach to doping control aims to integrate information from social sciences (e.g., psychology of doping) into organised intelligence to protect clean sport. Beyond the foreseeable consequences of a positive identification as a doping user, this task is further complicated by the discrepancy between what constitutes a doping offence in the World Anti-Doping Code and operationalized in doping research. Whilst psychology plays an important role in developing our understanding of doping behaviour in order to inform intervention and prevention, its contribution to the array of doping diagnostic tools is still in its infancy. In both research and forensic settings, we must acknowledge that (1) socially desirable responding confounds self-reported psychometric test results and (2) that the cognitive complexity surrounding test performance means that the response-time based measures and the lie detector tests for revealing concealed life-events (e.g., doping use) are prone to produce false or non-interpretable outcomes in field settings. Differences in social-cognitive characteristics of doping behaviour that are tested at group level (doping users vs. non-users) cannot be extrapolated to individuals; nor these psychometric measures used for individual diagnostics. In this paper, we present a position statement calling for policy guidance on appropriate use of psychometric assessments in the pursuit of clean sport. We argue that, to date, both self-reported and response-time based psychometric tests for doping have been designed, tested and validated to explore how athletes feel and think about doping in order to develop a better understanding of doping behaviour, not to establish evidence for doping. A false 'positive' psychological profile for doping affects not only the individual 'clean' athlete but also their entourage, their organisation and sport itself. The proposed policy guidance aims to protect the global athletic community against social, ethical and legal consequences from potential misuse of psychological tests, including erroneous or incompetent applications as forensic diagnostic tools in both practice and research. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. KW - Prohibited performance enhancement KW - Athlete KW - Drug KW - Anti-doping KW - Attitude Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2015.04.022 SN - 0955-3959 SN - 1873-4758 VL - 26 IS - 11 SP - 1130 EP - 1139 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Brand, Ralf A1 - Melzer, Marcus A1 - Hagemann, Norbert T1 - Towards an implicit association test (IAT) for measuring doping attitudes in sports. Data-based recommendations developed from two recently published tests JF - Psychology of sport and exercise : PSE ; an official journal of the European Federation of Sport Psychology N2 - Objectives: Today, the doping attitudes of athletes can either be measured by asking athletes directly or with the help of indirect attitude measurement procedures as for example the implicit association test (IAT). Using indirect measures may be helpful for example when psychological effects of doping prevention programs shall be evaluated. In the present study we have analyzed and compared measurement properties of two recently published IATs. Design: The IATs "doping substance vs. tea blend" and "doping substance vs. legal nutritional supplement" were presented to two randomly assigned independent samples of 102 athletes (44 male, 58 female; mean age 23.6 years) from different sports. Both IATs were complemented by a control IAT "word vs. non-word". Methods: In order to test central measurement properties of both IATs, distributions of measured values, correlations with the control IAT, reliability analyses, and analyses of error rates were performed. Results: Results pointed to a rather negative doping attitude in most athletes. Especially the fact that in the "doping vs. supplement" IAT error rates (12%) and adaptational learning effects across test blocks were substantial (eta(2) = .22), indicating that participants had difficulties correctly assigning the word stimuli to the respective category, we see slight advantages for the "doping vs. tea" IAT (e.g. satisfactory internal scale consistency Cronbach's-alpha = .78 among athletes reporting to be regularly involved in competitions). Conclusion: The less satisfactory measurement properties of the "doping vs. supplement" IAT can possibly be explained by the fact that the boundaries between (legal) supplements and (illegal) doping substances have been shifted from time to time so that athletes were not sure whether substances were legal or not. KW - Doping KW - Attitude KW - Implicit association test (IAT) Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2011.01.002 SN - 1469-0292 VL - 12 IS - 3 SP - 250 EP - 256 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER -