According to United Nations (2012), between 15% and 76% women have been targeted for physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime worldwide, which makes violence against women become a serious social problem. The most common type of violence against women is violence perpetrated by a current or former intimate partner, including physical, verbal, economic, or sexual violence, which 30% of women have experienced when being in a relationship (World Health Organization, 2013). For the purpose of this article, intimate partner violence is used to define any form of physical, verbal, economic, or sexual violence perpetrated by a current or former intimate partner, a term used interchangeably in the literature with partner violence, family violence, domestic violence etc. Despite cultural, social, and economic differences, intimate partner violence against women (IP-VAW) is an evident health and human rights issue across the world, which can lead to negative impact on victims' wellbeing, such as poor sexual health, increased pain, and pharmaceutical prescription use (e.g., Cerulli et al., 2012; García-Moreno et al., 2006; Humphreys & Joseph, 2004; Moe & Bell, 2004). Besides, victims will also suffer from mental health burden, including, but not limited to, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (e.g., Lutwak, 2018).

The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between academic stress and motivation toward physical education (PE) through a longitudinal design with cross-lagged panel analyses. A sample of 556 Chinese secondary school students participated in the research and completed Perceived Locus of Causality Scale and Educational Stress Scale for Adolescents at the beginning of the semester and 3 months later. The results demonstrated that academic stress factors were positively related to less self-determined motivations except that worry about grades was positively related to more self-determined motivations within each time point. In addition, we found that academic stress negatively predicted more self-determined motivations but positively predicted less self-determined motivations, whereas worry about grades negatively predicted amotivation 3 months later. Meanwhile, the influence of amotivation on despondency was also found. These results suggest that academic stress can obstruct students’ participation in PE through an impact on self-determined motivation. Our findings also indicate that self-determined students in PE will seek academic achievement as well, which in turn improves students’ academic status.