Measuring perfectionism in sport, dance, and exercise: Review, critique, recommendations

Over the past 25 years, a number of multidimensional measures of perfectionism has been developed. Based on different models of multidimensional perfectionism, these measures contain different numbers of subscales, and most of the time the different subscales bear different names. This presents a confusing situation to researchers unfamiliar with the often complex details of the perfectionism literature who want to conduct research on perfectionism in sport, dance, and exercise and need to make a decision as to what measure to use to capture individual differences in multidimensional perfectionism. The aim of the present chapter is to give researchers some guidance in this decision. To this aim, the chapter will (a) review the available multidimensional measures that have been published in international peer-reviewed journals and (b) provide a critique of these measures. In addition, the chapter will provide (c) recommendations on which measures to use and guidance on which decisions researchers have to make when using these measures to capture perfectionism in sport, dance, and exercise.