Sports preferences in children and adolescents in psychiatric care-evaluation of a new questionnaire.

Introduction: As part of an exploratory and hypothesis-generating study, we developed the Sports Preference Questionnaire (SPOQ) to survey the athletic behavior of mentally ill children and adolescents, subjectively assessed physical fitness and perceived psychological effects of physical activity.

Methods: In a department of child and adolescent psychiatry, we classified 313 patients (6-18 years) according to their primary psychiatric diagnosis. The patients or-in the parental version of the questionnaire-their parents reported their sport preferences on the SPOQ.