Students’ Motivational Profiles in the Physical Education Context

Abstract

The purpose of the current study is to test the self-determination theory (SDT) continuum hypothesis of motivation using latent profile analysis (LPA). A total of 3,220 school students took part in the study. We compared LPA solutions estimated using the four motivation types versus the two higher-order dimensions to assess their degree of correspondence to the SDT continuum hypothesis. To examine the concurrent validity of the profiles, we also verified their associations with three predictors (age, gender, perception of physical education teachers' autonomy-supportive behaviors) and two outcomes variables (perceived competence and intentions to be physically active). The results showed that profiling using the four motivation types provides more differentiated and meaningful description of responses to the Perceived Locus of Causality Scale, compared with profiling using two higher-order factors. In general, the results of the current study were consistent with the SDT continuum hypothesis of human motivation.

Similar but different: Profiling secondary school students based on their perceived motivational climate and psychological need-based experiences in physical education

“…Regardless, from a gender equality perspective, we believe our findings are favourable in that the PE teachers in the schools of our sample apparently succeed in creating learning environments that neither favour boys nor girls in the less desirable profiles. Our findings regarding age contrast with research indicating that older students are overrepresented in low-quality motivation clusters, and younger students being underrepresented [10,62,76].…”

“…The Schwarz Bayesian information criterion (BIC) was used to determine the optimal number of clusters. The BIC is considered as an objective and useful selection criterion [61,62,63].…”

“…Concerning gender, this finding is consistent with profiling studies by Boiché et al [10] and Ntoumanis [75] who also found no association between students' gender and membership of the favourable or less favourable motivational profiles. However, other studies have reported conflicting findings, reporting girls to be overrepresented in either the more [76] or less desirable profiles [62,77]. These contrasting findings may stem from differing methodological approaches but could also represent a cultural or educational difference between the contexts from which the groups of students were sampled.…”

Profiles of adversity and resilience resources: A latent class analysis of two samples

“…Sample size is another important consideration for selecting the final model, because with a sufficiently large sample size the observed indicators may carry on suggesting the addition of more classes without reaching a minimum (Morin & Wang, ). In such cases, the information criteria can be presented in elbow plots to show the gains offered by additional classes; the point at which the line flattens shows the optimum number of classes (Wang, Morin, Ryan, & Liu, ).…”

Perfiles de orientación hacia la meta y su relación con indicadores de actividad físico-deportiva

“…En el establecimiento de tales clústeres, se ha recurrido a variables motivacionales derivadas de la teoría de la orientación hacia la meta de Nicholls (Martínez-Galindo et al, 2009;Wang et al, 2002;Wang, Biddle, & Elliot, 2007;Wang et al, 2010) o bien a las dimensiones incluidas en la teoría de la motivación autodeterminada (Çaglar & Asçi, 2010;Hein & Jõessar, 2015;Jaakkola, Wang, Soini, & Liukkonen, 2015;MorenoMurcia, Cervelló-Gimeno, Huéscar-Hernández, Belando-Pedreño, & Rodríguez-Marín, 2013;Wang, Morin, Ryan, & Liu, 2016).…”