Measuring student motivation for physical education: Examining the psychometric properties of the Perceived Locus of Causality Questionnaire and the Situational Motivation Scale

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to evaluate, within a cross-cultural context, the psychometric properties of scores derived from the Perceived Locus of Causality Questionnaire (PLOCQ) and the Situational Motivation Scale (SIMS). Both questionnaires are grounded in self-determination theory and are commonly employed in physical education research. Method: Secondaryschool students fromtheUnitedKingdom(UK;n1⁄4300,meanage1⁄413.71)andHongKong (HK; n 1⁄4 342, mean age 1⁄4 15.34 years) completed both questionnaires prior to a physical education lesson. Results: Internal consistency analyses, as well as single and multi-group confirmatory factor analyses produced evidence that largely supported the reliability and validity of PLOCQ and SIMS scores in the UK sample. However, the analyses indicated some areas of concern regarding the internal consistency of the external and introjected regulation PLOCQ items in the HK sample. Also, identified regulation and intrinsic motivation constructs were not distinguishable by youth in either culture in either questionnaire. Finally, compared with the UK, students in HK interpreted the SIMS external regulation items to be more self-determined. Conclusions: Researchers interested in studying contextual and situational motivation in UK physical education classes should, in general, feel confident in using the PLOCQ and the SIMS, respectively. However, our results highlight some important difficulties in the measurement of contextual and situational motivation in HK Chinese students. Further research is needed to better understand how students from different cultures respond to items intended to tap controlling forms of motivation. Crown Copyright ! 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Motivation is an important variable to consider in the physical education (PE) context, as adaptive types of motivation have been associated with intentions to exercise (Standage, Duda, & Ntoumanis, 2003), step counts during PE classes (Lonsdale, Sabiston, Raedeke, Ha, & Sum, 2009) and physical activity during leisure-time (Gordon-Larsen, McMurray, & Popkin, 2000; Hagger, Chatzisarantis, Culverhouse, & Biddle, 2003). Self-determination theory (SDT; Ryan & Deci, 2002) has been widely used to study motivation within the PE context (see review by Ntoumanis & Standage, 2009). Nonetheless, there has been limited attention paid to the validity of scores derived from popular SDT-based measures of students’ motivation for PE. Filling this research gap is important if SDT is to continue as a significant framework to study motivation in PE. The primary purpose of the current study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of scores derived from two instruments, the Perceived LocusofCausalityQuestionnaire (PLOCQ;Goudas,Biddle,&Fox,1994) and the Situational Motivation Scale (SIMS; Guay, Vallerand, & Blanchard, 2000), both of which are grounded in SDT and are commonly employed in research in the PE context (Lonsdale et al., 2009; Ntoumanis, 2001, 2005; Prusak, Treasure, Darst, & Pangrazi, 2004; Taylor & Ntoumanis, 2007). A second aim was to investigate the cross-cultural equivalence of scores derived from thesemeasures in the United Kingdom (UK) and the Chinese ‘special administrative region’ of Hong Kong (HK). Examining the cross-cultural validity of scores derived from popular motivation questionnaires is an important researchobjective, given theproposedapplicability of SDT tenets across cultures (Deci et al., 2001). * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ61 2 9852 5403; fax: þ61 2 9852 5534. E-mail address: [email protected] (C. Lonsdale).