Need Satisfaction and Gender Identity in Middle Childhood: An Application of Self-Determination Theory

• In Event: Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

Self-determination theory (SDT; Ryan & Deci, 2000) states that humans are driven towards the satisfaction of basic psychological needs defined as “innate psychological nutriments that are essential for ongoing psychological growth, integrity, and well-being” (p. 229). The three essential needs described in SDT research include competence (i.e., a mastery of one’s environment), autonomy (i.e., having the ability or initiative to make one’s own choices), and relatedness (i.e., feelings of closeness or connectedness with others). Children are thought to have a natural tendency to meet these needs through play by developing new skills, exploring their worlds, and integrating new experience into their current understanding (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Reeve, 2005). The satisfaction of SDT needs in children is essential for their well-being, including their self-esteem (Lynch & Salikhova, 2016), mental health (Véronneau et al., 2005), and educational performance (Guay et al., 2008). SDT literature discusses three antecedents to a child’s need satisfaction: parents (Soenens et al., 2017), school (Vallerand et al., 1997), and peers (Lenhart, 2010). Prior studies have successfully used the Children’s Intrinsic Needs Satisfaction Scale (CINSS; Koestner & Veronneau, 2001) to measure need satisfaction of children 8-19 years old across three domains: home, school, and peers (Quinlan et al., 2015; Zull et al., 2019). The current study had two goals: (1) to test whether the addition of a “personal” domain would improve the reliability and validity of the scale, and (2) to look for any gender or age differences in need satisfaction during middle childhood. An online survey was completed by 219 children with a mean age of 9.77 years (SD= 1.35), 50.5% male. The original CINSS contains 18-items, six each to measure the satisfaction of competence, autonomy, and relatedness needs. The satisfaction of each need (competence, autonomy, and relatedness) is measured by two items that are repeated three times to measure the feeling of satisfaction that a child gets from their parents, their school, and their peers. For this study, two items were added to each SDT need to measure how the child feels about their personal satisfaction of the need, such as “I feel that I am good at many things.” All items were measured on a four-point Likert-type scale (1 = really false for me; 4 = very true of me). As shown in Table 1, reliability for the dimensions of the extended CINSS scale (CINSS-P) were similar to those found in research using the original CINSS scale (Véronneau et al., 2005). As shown in Table 2, t-tests revealed that girls reported higher need satisfaction in the domains of competence, relatedness, home, and peers than boys. Regression analysis showed that age was not a significant predictor of any of the measured domains of need satisfaction. These findings demonstrate that the personal domain of need satisfaction is a strong addition to the scale, and provide interesting insight on differences between boys and girls in their self-reported need satisfaction during middle childhood.

Authors

• Melina R Aley, Michigan State University
  Presenting Author

• Fashina Alade, Michigan State University
  Non-Presenting Author