The story begins in 1993, when Brewer and colleagues first defined athletic identity as the degree to which an individual identifies with the athlete role and introduced the original ten-item AIMS. That scale has since been translated into more than 20 languages and has fueled over 100 peer-reviewed studies worldwide. But decades of research exposed cracks in its design. Subsequent analyses suggested the scale might be multidimensional, and a 2001 revision trimmed it to seven items. Then, in 2022, Brewer and colleagues acknowledged a deeper problem: only one item on the revised scale—”I consider myself an athlete”—clearly measured self-identification as an athlete, while the other six seemed to capture precursors, correlates, or outcomes of that identification. The AIMS-3G was their answer, built from a pool of more than 100 candidate items refined down to 41 through expert review and factor analysis.

What makes the AIMS-3G distinctive is that it separates athletic identity itself from its properties and its processes. The core Athletic Identity scale contains just four items. Two additional scales capture properties: Prominence, reflecting how important being an athlete is relative to other parts of a person’s self-identity, and Self-Worth Contingency, measuring how much a person’s sense of self-worth depends on sporting performance and involvement. Two further scales capture processes—the dynamic elements that act upon and change athletic identity—namely Social Reinforcement, receiving validation from others for one’s sporting activities, and Self-Presentation, presenting oneself as an athlete. All 21 items are rated on seven-point agreement scales, and the entire instrument can be completed in minutes.

The Bern team translated the scale following the classical forward-backward procedure established by Vallerand, with two bilingual test developers and experienced sport psychologists independently producing translations. Crucially, they also consulted the developer of the AIMS-3G to confirm the intended meaning of each item, an unusually rigorous safeguard for content validity. Their participants, drawn from sport science courses at the University of Bern, were almost universally active in sport—98% reported extracurricular sporting activity across 58 different sports, ranging from football and volleyball to fitness training and floorball. On average they had practiced their main sport for ten years and trained just over four hours a week, and half competed, many at national or international level.

The statistical heart of the study was a head-to-head comparison of competing factor models using exploratory structural equation modeling, or ESEM. Initial exploratory factor analyses of one to six factors showed that models with fewer than five factors fit poorly, while five- and six-factor models fit well; parallel analysis and the weak definition of a sixth factor settled the question in favor of the five-factor solution. When the researchers then tested confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) against ESEM, ESEM emerged as clearly superior. This matters because CFA forces every item to load on a single construct, whereas ESEM allows small cross-loadings—a more realistic representation of how psychological items actually behave. Factor loadings in the ESEM solution were moderate to high, cross-loadings were small, and the five latent factors correlated only moderately with each other, suggesting related but genuinely distinct dimensions.

The team did not stop there. They also tested bifactor models, in which every item loads both on a general factor and on its specific factor, to see whether the construct might be better conceived as hierarchical. Although a bifactor-ESEM solution showed excellent fit, it offered virtually no improvement over the plain ESEM model, and some of its specific factors were weakly defined or nearly empty. Combined with the original authors’ theoretical stance that the five dimensions do not simply reflect facets of one global construct, the researchers retained the five-factor ESEM solution. Reliability was strong for four of the five scales, with McDonald’s omega coefficients between .81 and .91, and adequate at .72 for Social Reinforcement, the weakest scale.

Perhaps the most technically demanding part of the study was the measurement invariance testing, which asks whether the questionnaire measures the same thing in different groups. Using multi-group structural equation modeling, the team demonstrated strict—or at least partial strict—invariance across gender, across participation in organized versus independent sport, and across competition participation. This is the psychometric green light that allows researchers to compare latent scores between groups without fearing that any differences reflect measurement bias rather than real differences. For continuous variables such as age, years of involvement, and training volume, the team used differential item functioning tests within MIMIC models, which confirmed that the predictors influenced responses only through the latent factors themselves—no item-level bias was detected.

Substantively, the results painted a familiar but nuanced picture of who identifies most strongly as an athlete. Men scored significantly higher than women on the core Athletic Identity factor, a small-to-medium effect, while women scored higher on Social Reinforcement. Participants who trained independently scored lower on Athletic Identity, Prominence, and Social Reinforcement than club members, and competitors scored higher than non-competitors on nearly every factor, with medium-to-large effects. Younger participants reported higher Self-Worth Contingency and Social Reinforcement, and both greater training volume and longer involvement predicted higher scores on several factors. Construct validity analyses linked the AIMS-3G factors to sport satisfaction, physical self-concept, and both harmonious and obsessive passion, largely in line with expectations.

One surprise stands out: Self-Worth Contingency was significantly and negatively correlated with Physical Appearance self-concept. The authors offer a thought-provoking post hoc explanation rooted in objectification theory—the more a person’s self-worth hinges on sporting success, the more the body may be perceived as an instrument for performance rather than an object of aesthetic appreciation, inviting more critical appearance evaluations. Equally striking were the substantial correlations between Prominence and Self-Worth Contingency and obsessive passion (around .51 to .52), consistent with the dualistic model of passion, in which people with obsessive passion feel an obligation to engage in their activity to validate themselves and gain social recognition.

Three items underperformed slightly, echoing weaknesses noted in the original English validation, and one item—”Most of my friends are athletes”—struggled in both language versions, hinting at a conceptual issue. The researchers refined the German translations of these items and tested the alternatives in a follow-up sample of 104 students; the revised versions outperformed the originals on discrimination, item difficulty, and related metrics, and the revised scales correlated at .92 to .95 with the originals. The authors recommend adopting the revised items and call for translations into further languages, noting that the original AIMS had already crossed more than 20 linguistic borders. For elite sport—where injuries, deselection, and retirement can shatter an identity built around being an athlete—a validated, cross-culturally comparable measure of that identity may ultimately help researchers and practitioners spot the double-edged sword of strong athletic identity before it cuts.

Subject of Research: Psychometric validation of the German-language AIMS-3G athletic identity questionnaire

Article Title: Further psychometric examination of the third-generation athletic identity measurement scales (AIMS-3G): evidence from a German-language version

Article References: Schmid, M. J., Brewer, B. W., & Schmid, J. (2026). Further psychometric examination of the third-generation athletic identity measurement scales (AIMS-3G): evidence from a German-language version. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1542. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10068-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10068-x

Keywords: athletic identity, AIMS-3G, psychometrics, sport psychology, measurement invariance, exploratory structural equation modeling, scale validation, passion, physical self-concept, athletes, self-worth contingency, German translation