Mastery motivation in children with complex communication needs: longitudinal data analysis

Abstract

This study compared longitudinal changes in mastery motivation during parent-child free play for 37 children with complex communication needs. Mastery motivation manifests as a willingness to work hard at tasks that are challenging, which is an important quality to overcoming the challenges involved in successful expressive communication using AAC. Unprompted parent-child play episodes were identified in three assessment sessions over an 18-month period and coded for nine categories of mastery motivation in social and object play. All of the object-oriented mastery motivation categories and one social mastery motivation category showed an influence of motor skills after controlling for receptive language. Object play elicited significantly more of all of the object-focused mastery motivation categories than social play, and social play elicited more of one type of social-focused mastery motivation behavior than object play. Mastery motivation variables did not differ significantly over time for children. Potential physical and interpersonal influences on mastery motivation for parents and children with complex communication needs are discussed, including broadening the procedures and definitions of mastery motivation beyond object-oriented measurements for children with complex communication needs.

Keywords:

• Mastery motivation
• complex communication needs
• cerebral palsy
• toddler
• children

Acknowledgements

Portions of this paper were presented at the 2007 American Speech-Language-Hearing Conference, Boston, MA. The research was a student pre-doctoral project completed by the first author during her PhD program. The authors thank Jaime Bukrey and Lindsey Agnitsch for their contributions to coding research data, and all of the research families involved in this project for allowing us to come into their homes and share in interactions together.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflict of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Funding information

This research was supported in part by grant #K08 DC00102-01A1 from the National Institute on Deafness and other Communicative Disorders, National Institutes of Health (NIH), awarded to the second author.

Notes

1 The Panasonic AG 456 Video Camera is a product of the Panasonic Company of North America, Newark, NJ.

2 The JVC BR-S378U video deck and 20-inch JVC AB20BP6 monitor are products of the JVC Company of Wayne, NJ.