This chapter provides a basic introduction of research design based on the question or goal to be accomplished by the research. Statistical significance has an interesting history and is a horribly misunderstood term. Fisherian statistics has a very different approach to statistical testing. More recently, though, there has been a resurgence of Bayesian analysis across a wide variety of fields such as business, education, finance, and sociology. There is a host of numeric studies that analyze numbers, and these are separated into experimental and nonexperimental studies. Experiments are quite popular and some call them the “gold standard” of research. There are main core types of content in surveys that motivation researchers desire: demographic, knowledge, behavioral, and attitudinal. Ethnography arose primarily out of the cultural and social anthropological fields, which studied both how culture affected behavior and how cultural processes evolved over time.

Positive psychology falls within the perspective of humanism (or humanistic psychology) but is different because it focuses on testing ideas. Abraham Maslow had arguably the most well-known view of growth motivation because his concept appears in countless psychology and educational psychology textbooks. Optimism is an area that has an interesting past and has quite a cast of characters over time. Most recent, optimism has been viewed as a cognitive characteristic, but not just plain cognition because there is an emotional component to it. There are two types of happy in the motivation world. The first is hedonic, which focuses on the experience of pleasure, avoiding problems, and having a relaxed and good life. The second, eudaemonic happiness, focuses on three areas: wealth and materialism, attachment, and personal goals. Youth activities that promote positive development do have solid longitudinal research showing their effects.

Cultural research can tell us about the uniqueness of a culture, usually through amazing ethnographies. Comparative research can tell us about cultural similarities. A large body of cross-cultural studies in motivation uses surveys that have been adapted from one language to another. Though many models assume cultural invariance, most have tried to understand their models across cultures in order to understand the models’ strengths and weaknesses. Operant conditioning has specific assumptions that it is a universal model. Intrinsic motivation is one of the more interesting motivation topics culturally. Self-esteem is an area of cross-cultural research in which the question of the self matters. In general, Weiner views the causal parts of the attribution model—locus, stability, and control— and their relationship to self-esteem, expectancy of success, and the effects of guilt, shame, anger, and sympathy and their influence on action or behavior as near universal principles across cultures.

This chapter starts with a global definition of motivation: an internal state that arouses people to action, moves them in particular directions, and keeps people engaged in certain activities. Motivation is not a learning theory, but it affects what people learn. Classical conditioning, think Pavlov’s dogs is a learning theory and motivation has essentially no role in it. The chapter provides an overview of early theories of motivation, starting with Aristotle. Compulsion occurs when people feel that they must act, even though they may not wish to act in a particular way. For ancient Greek philosophers, hedonism meant pleasure is to exceed pain over the long haul, thereby acknowledging life will not always be pleasurable. The James–Lange theory involves motivation from an emotional perspective. Behaviorism is hard to describe mainly because most people have a misunderstanding of two of its elements: punishment and reinforcement.

There are several aspects related to being intrinsically motivated that are important to everyone. The first is persistence. A second area is creativity. Stress and anxiety are lower when we are intrinsically motivated. Self-determination theory (SDT) is a large-scale model for motivation. In addition, SDT allows for the discussion of social development, individual differences, and cultural factors that can assist or impede a person’s progress. Competence is the need to be effective in our environment. Three areas to keep in mind with competence are cognitive competence, social competence, and performance competence. Relatedness is the need to develop long-term secure relationships with people. Cognitive evaluation (CE) theory explains and predicts how an external action affects your intrinsic motivation. Organismic integration (OI) theory focuses on understanding how people acquire, internalize, and then integrate extrinsic reinforcers. Causality orientations (CO) theory is used to explain individual differences in the motivational forces that cause behavior.

A goal is a desired outcome or level of attainment for an individual. Goals can be discussed from four orientations: mastery, performance, work avoidance, and social orientation. Individuals with a mastery orientation tend to look for challenging tasks and persist longer at those tasks because they are more focused. Performance-focused individuals tend to worry about how they compare with others. Goals are important and goal setting is crucial for moving forward. Long-term goals are better suited for increasing intrinsic motivation. Personal investment (PI) theory is a conglomeration of several other theories of motivation that came before it. Its focus is behavioral, but the model is a social cognitive model because it assumes that choice, persistence, and differing levels of activity are derived from beliefs and values from the culture you live in and that are part of you, the self.

This chapter is about “the self” and how people think about their successes and failures. It describes several focused theories within the thematic concept of self-evaluation or self-judgment. For example, attribution theory examines how an individual attributes success and failure across activities. Self-efficacy focuses on the original concept of one’s belief in the ability to successfully complete a task. Attribution theory seeks to predict expectancy and emotions by examining individuals’ causal attributions in attempting to make sense of their related performances in many achievement-related instances. A major reason for using attribution theory as a framework is that it addresses two important components of achievement motivation that are relevant to collaborative contexts: expectancy for success and emotions. In general, there is a small relationship between self-concept and school success. Self-efficacy is a vibrant research area in education, business, sports, and across cultures.

This chapter talks about topics related to incentives, rewards, reinforcers, and punishers using the operant-conditioning framework. Rewards, incentives, and reinforcers are used interchangeably in daily life, but they are quite distinct, and understanding their difference can help one understand the behaviors they see versus the behaviors one expected. When a certain behavior needs to be increased, reinforcers are commonly implemented to get that behavior going, especially simple behaviors. Contracts for athletes, coaches, chief executive officers (CEOs), and many other individuals are set up with incentives. In many companies, sales representatives have certain monetary goals they must reach to receive a bonus. Research in the late 1970s and the 1980s began to indicate serious issues with using extrinsic reinforcers; specifically, that reinforced behaviors that are already being performed decrease engagement in that activity in the future. Praise is part of the extrinsic-reinforcement world.

Individuals have beliefs and judgments about their ability to successfully complete an activity or task. In the motivation world, people call these expectations. In addition to expectations, people also have a value system associated with the expectation. Modern versions of expectancy value (EV) are still descendants of Atkinson’s work and are based on achievement performance, persistence, and choice. Within the task-value beliefs there are four components: attainment value, intrinsic (interest enjoyment) value, utility value, and cost. There are emotional components to success and failure or even the expectancy of the two. In addition to the poor performance, people tend to try and avoid making a mistake, quit early, and lose interest rapidly. This pattern, fear of failure leading to performance-avoidance goals, leads to poor adjustment skills and anxiety. Related to the performance and mastery concepts is an implicit theory of intelligence.