Culture's Consequences on Student Motivation: Capturing Cross-Cultural Universality and Variability Through Personal Investment Theory

Abstract

Culture influences basic motivational processes; however, Western theories of achievement motivation seem to have neglected the role of culture. They are inadequate when trying to explain student motivation and engagement across a wide range of cultural groups because they may not have the conceptual tools needed to handle culturally relevant information. Personal investment (PI) theory is proposed as a viable alternative that could be used across diverse cultural contexts. It designates three components of meaning: sense of self, perceived goals, and facilitating conditions as central to understanding investment in the educational enterprise. Moreover, it is an integrative framework that can shed light on both etic (culturally universal) and emic (culturally specific) dimensions of student motivation. Studies utilizing PI theory are reviewed revealing interesting etic and emic findings. Implications for cross-cultural research in educational psychology are discussed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We gratefully acknowledge editor Clark Chinn and the two anonymous reviewers for extremely helpful comments on a previous draft. We have benefited immensely from their insights and guidance.

Notes

¹ This article builds on an earlier publication by Zusho and Clayton (2011), where they argued for the need to culturalize achievement goal research. Their article focused on the metatheoretical and epistemological stances (universalism, relativism, and absolutism) that educational researchers have toward culture and they discussed how these stances could play out in achievement goal research. They also suggested the intriguing possibility that PI theory might be particularly suited to examining student motivation across diverse cultures. However, their treatment of PI theory was necessarily brief and focused only on its implications for achievement goal theory. Having been freed of the need to lay the philosophical/epistemological groundwork for why a universalist approach is most germane to motivational science (as this has already been well articulated by their article), we were able to focus on putting forth a clearer articulation of PI theory and how it can be used for understanding cross-cultural data.

² The goal construct has been a notoriously ill-defined term in psychology with Elliot and Fryer (2008) claiming that “researchers and theorists commonly neglect to offer a definition of goal, even as they use it extensively in their work” (p. 235). To offer a more precise conceptual definition of goal, they claimed that a goal has the following characteristics: (a) it is focused on an object, (b) it is used to guide or direct behavior, (c) it is focused on the future, (d) it is internally represented, and (e) it is something that the organism is committed to approach or avoid. The perceived goals of behavior dimension in PI theory also shares these characteristics, which makes PI goals conceptually and empirically distinct from the various sense of self components, which pertain more to identity-relevant processes.

³ We are especially thankful to the editor, Clark Chinn, for taking the initial steps at articulating this taxonomy of possible cross-cultural differences.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ronnel B. King

Ronnel B. King is now at The Hong Kong Institute of Education.