Validity and reliability of observational scales for volleyball techniques: Floating serve with support, block and defense.

Abstract

Objective: Elaborate, validate and test the intra and inter-expert reliability of observational scales for the examination of the volleyball techniques, floating serve with support, simple offensive blocking and underhand defense. Methods: Sixteen coaches of the brazilian national volleyball team with more than ten years of practice in this sport, participated in the validation. Each coach evaluated five actions of each volleyball technique, performed by five federated volleyball athletes. Multiple Kappa test (KM) was used for statistical analysis of inter and intra-expert agreement strength and the significance level adopted was p <0.05. Results: The three scales obtained agreement indexes (≥87.5%) for content validity. Regarding intra-expert reliability, the results demonstrated that the observational, blocks, and defense scales had good agreement strength (0.40≤KM≤0.59). Regarding the inter-expert reliability, the observational scales serve (KM=0.75) and defense (KM=0.66) presente very good agreement strength and the observational scale block (KM=0.82) obtained excellent concordance strength. Conclusions: The scales are reliable and suitable for the analysis of motor skills floating serve with support, simple offensive blocking and underhand defense.