Research Motives of Faculty in Academic STEM

Abstract

The authors examined the psychometric properties of the Research Motivation Scale (RMS) in a sample of faculty members ( N = 337) in university science departments. It was hypothesized that the RMS would evidence partial measurement invariance across tenure status and noninvariance across gender, given the different sociocultural factors (e.g., gender role bias) that regulate the research behavior of men and women. Gender was thus predicted to moderate the relations between the latent RMS factors and their defining items. Results of confirmatory factor analytic testing yielded support for the hypotheses, while post hoc probing of sources of noninvariance indicated that men and women differed mostly on measures of extrinsic reward and failure avoidance. Implications for motivation measurement and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) career development are discussed.