Examining the psychometric properties of the Chinese Behavioral Regulation in Exercise Questionnaire-3: A bi-factor approach

The Behavioral Regulation in Exercise Questionnaire (BREQ) was revised to its third iteration (BREQ-3) and has been widely used to measure different types of exercise motivation, including amotivation, external regulation, introjected regulation, identified regulation, integrated regulation, and intrinsic motivation. However, the Chinese version has not been similarly revised. The aim of this study was to develop and examine the psychometric properties of the Chinese BREQ-3 using alternative structural equation models. Specifically, this study aimed to translate the English BREQ-3 into Chinese to examine the best representation of the factor configuration of Chinese BREQ-3, measurement invariance for the best-fitted model, and the concurrent validity evidence and reliability for the Chinese BREQ-3. Undergraduate students (N = 825) from mainland China completed a battery of online questionnaires. After including two general motivation factors (controlled motivation and autonomous motivation), we discovered that the majority of items on the identified regulation, integrated regulation, and intrinsic motivation subscales no longer loaded on or had very low loadings on their specific factors, implying that these items essentially represent a unidimensional construct. Invariance testing supported the comparison between latent factor means across gender based on the bi-factor exploratory structural equation model (BESEM). Concurrent validity evidence was found for amotivation, controlled motivation, and autonomous motivation. The hierarchical omega, explained common variance (ECV), item explained common variance (I_ECV), and percentage of uncontaminated correlations (PUC) indicated that the external regulation and introjected regulation subscales had a multidimensional structure, while the identified regulation, integrated regulation, and intrinsic motivation subscales had a unidimensional structure (autonomous motivation). We advocate calculating amotivation, external regulation, introjected regulation, and a single autonomous motivation (excluding item 19) score when utilizing the Chinese BREQ-3.