Autonomous motivation is the highest level of motivational continuity in Self-Determination Theory, which refers to people doing something for their own interests, for the sake of attaining enjoyment completely in activities (Ryan & Deci, 2017). so can can say the constructs of ’autonomous motivation‘ and ’interest‘ are the same?
Dear Ziyun,
Interest and motivation are two different constructs. In its simplest for, you might say that interest definitely leads to motivation while it is not true other way round.
Autonomous motivation encompasses identified regulation and integrated regulation. In either case there is a behavior component (doing something) that is usually cross situational and is somehow related to your well-being and self, whereas having interest does not necessarily lead to doing something, is not cross situational (you can suddenly lose the interest) and does not have deep psychological meaning.
In my opinion, using the construct "interest" in research instead of the construct "autonomous motivation" would narrow and broaden the outcomes and therefore harming the validation of the research. For instance, I haven thousands thoughts every day, on topics I am interested in, but very few of them last for more then a few seconds. On the other had, autonomous motivation cannot occur without interest, so I think you can build a hierarchy using the constructs interest and autonomous motivation. And it becomes more tricky when you realize individuals can be interested in pleasing others for reasons forced upon them.
In attached figure you can see that autonomous motivation includes identified, integrated and intrinsic regulation. And intrinsic motivation mostly deels with the construst of interest according to its definition and mearsurement scale items.
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