Hope of success and fear of failure components of Mehrabian's scales of resultant achievement motivation

Abstract

This report is concerned with the factor structure and psychometric properties of the nonprojective Male and Female scales of Resultant Achievement Motivation (RAM) developed by Mehrabian ( Educational and Psychological Measurement, 1968, 28, 493–503). The 26-item self-report scales along with Mandler and Sarason's ( Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1952 , 47, 166–173) Test Anxiety Questionnaire (TAQ) were administered to 237 males and 225 females in Experiment 1. Unrestricted maximum likelihood factor analyses of the RAM scales revealed four primary factors for each version. Since the first two factors from both analyses resembled measures of Hope of Success and Fear of Failure, two strategies for improving the scales were adopted, both of which eliminated the items loading on factors III and IV. One strategy involved adding the indexes of Hope of Success and Fear of Failure, while the other involved finding their difference. Construct validity coefficients were computed for the 26-item full scales, and the RAM measures formed using the above strategies with student grade point average and TAQ scores as the criterion variables. In Experiment 2, the appropriate RAM scale and the TAQ were administered to 30 males and 38 females. Construct validity coefficients were computed in this cross validation sample with the three RAM measures as predictors and with TAQ scores and student achievement in a course in Social/Personality Psychology as the criterion variables. The three RAM measures were used to predict the performance of 16 males who worked at a common laboratory task (anagrams) in Experiment 3. The results of all three experiments indicate the Hope of Success minus Fear of Failure measure to be the best measure of RAM from a theoretical, psychometric, and pragmatic point of view.