Introduction to the Workshop

• In Event: Fostering Complexity in the Conceptualization and Study of Motivation, Engagement, and Self-Regulated Learning: A Workshop

Abstract

In a recent study, Saqr and colleagues (2024) investigated the relations of situated attainment task-value (personal importance of the task) and momentary happiness using data from 107 German university students who completed five daily experience sampling surveys over eight days. A correlational analysis across the sample found support for predictions of Situated Expectancy Value Theory (SEVT; Wigfield & Eccles, 2020) with a positive and significant regression coefficient (beta=.46) between task value and happiness. However, when the researchers conducted a person-centered analysis, they identified two distinct groups of participants that differed in this relationship. Whereas the coefficient in the sizable group of 91 participants was positive and high (beta=1.07), the coefficient in a small group of 16 participants was negative and high (beta=-1.72). Furthermore, when the researchers fitted a regression model for the data of each student in the sample, they found tremendous heterogeneity of coefficients, ranging from negative (beta=-.50) to positive (beta=.57), with negative coefficients among 33 students and positive coefficients among 69 students.

These findings correspond with those from other recent studies (Kaplan et al., 2019; Martin et al., 2015; Saqr & López-Pernas, 2024) that point to consequential discrepancies between findings from the prevalent, inter-individual, analytical methods and those from idiographic methods that find relations to vary greatly between individuals in both valence and magnitude (Molnaar & Cambpell, 2009). Together, the findings highlight the ecological fallacy of deriving inferences about individuals from group level data, and support Hilpert & Marchand’s (2018) proposition that the role, strength, and direction of effects likely vary among people and from context to context.

Moreover, the findings correspond with assumptions of complexity perspectives on motivation, engagement, and SRL that relations of any two variables at the level of the individual are not independent from the other variables involved in that person’s experience. Complexity perspectives that emphasize the “interaction dominance” nature of phenomena call for conceptualizing them as reflecting the interdependence of multiple factors that interact continuously to give rise to nonlinear patterns that differ between and within individuals (Bullock, 2022; Garner & Russell, 2016; Kaplan et al., 2012; Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2023; Marchand & Hilpert, 2024).

Studying phenomena as complex requires re-imagining prevalent “component dominant” representations into “interaction dominant” representations (Hilpert & Marchand, 2018). This re-imagining involves incorporating assumptions that include: (1) interdependence of the variables in a phenomenon’s conceptual system; (2) variability and non-linearity of the variables’ relations; (3) personal and context dependency of the variable’ relations. Figure 1 presents a schematic illustration that can be used as a scaffold for re-drawing a component-dominant representation of the expectancy-value motivational system as an interaction-dominant representation of that phenomenon (cf. Kaplan et al., 2019).

This workshop will use worked examples and scaffolds with the aim to support researchers in:
(1) Re-imagining a preferred phenomenon by creating or refining a complexity-informed, interaction-dominant theoretical model.
(2) Conceptualizing a study that uses quantitative or qualitative methods to capture its complexity.

Authors

• Avi Kaplan, Temple University

• Joanna K. Garner, Old Dominion University

• Jonathan C. Hilpert, University of Nevada - Las Vegas

• Gwen C. Marchand, University of Nevada - Las Vegas