Assessing and Modeling Motivation

Motivation is a psychological construct that cannot be directly assessed. For this reason, it is critically important that investigators utilize instruments with demonstrated psychometric properties. Unfortunately, researchers too often rely on measures and scales that purport to tap particular motivational constructs yet lack sufficient evidence of reliability and validity. When this happens, results from such studies are difficult to interpret and too often confuse the psychological meanings of the constructs they purport to measure. This problem is compounded with scales translated from one language or from one culture to another. A group of highly trained researchers in psychological measurement, statistics, and longitudinal modeling are hence engaged in the process of developing and validating both new and imported motivation scales for Korean children and adolescents to be used in the research studies conducted by bMRI and others.