Growing together: An analysis of measurement transparency across 15 years of player motivation questionnaires

Abstract

There are many questionnaires to assess player motivation, originating from a diverse range of disciplines. Each discipline differs in their usage and reporting of questionnaires, but there has been no attempt to standardise their application. No standard approach leads to a lack of transparency in usage reporting, which affects the ability of the field to synthesise. This has made it unclear whether player motivation research is a unified community, or a collection of individuals with a similar goal. Therefore, the current work assesses the transparency of reporting practices of player motivation questionnaires published within the last 15 years. 18 questionnaires were identified via a scoping review, then papers citing these questionnaires were analysed for their transparency of reporting practices (n=238); first via a content analysis of justifications for use, then followed by an analysis of transparency against eight criteria created for this work. Overall, reporting transparency is lacking, driven by little priority for presenting items alongside text. Many papers use questionnaires because they are theory-based or have measured specific variables in previous works, but explicit justification is rare. The work concludes with a transparency checklist based on the eight criteria used, which authors can use to standardise the field and allow for more cohesive research synthesis.