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 Anti-Doping 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.