Development of the Short Form of the Goal-Striving Reasons Questionnaire

Journal of Well-Being Assessment volume 4, pages75–94(2020)Cite this article

Abstract

This paper describes the development of the short form of the goal-striving reasons questionnaire. The short form was developed by re-examining data from four previously published studies which employed the long form of the goal-striving reasons questionnaire. Additionally, a further cross-validation study was employed using the short form by itself (N = 125). Overall, the analyses reveal that the short form has equally good internal reliability, construct validity and predictive power with regard to affective and cognitive subjective well-being, work engagement and burnout when compared to the long form. Based on these results, it can be concluded that the short form, which reduces the number of items for each self-reported goal from 16 to eight, does provide a reliable and valid instrument and therefore offers a more parsimonious way to measure the reasons why people pursue their most important goals. Implications, particularly for practice, are discussed.

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. 1.

    The relative predictive power of goal-striving reasons and self-concordance was hereby tested using hierarchical regression analysis. The results in all studies showed that goal-striving reasons when added to the regression model after self-concordance explained a (significant) higher amount of variance than self-concordance and in most cases rendered self-concordance as not significant.

  2. 2.

    Ehrlich (2019) argues in this context that the focus on autonomy means that autonomous goal pursuit is conceptualised as a task-inherent characteristic – and therefore the direct influence of others (for example their positive or negative feedback or support is given less emphasis within a measure of autonomous goal pursuit).

  3. 3.

    The rationale for choosing two items to measure each goal-striving reason was because choosing only one item per goal-striving reasons resulted in very low internal reliabilities of the overall goal-striving reasons index below .60.

  4. 4.

    Both method of factor analyses have employed varimax rotation based on the (theoretical) assumption that the four goal-striving reasons factors are independent of each other. Thus, it is assumed that degree to which people strive for their goals out of pleasure does not predict the extent to which they strive for their goals out of altruism, necessity or self-esteem. However, Appendix Tables 11 and 12 contain the results of main-component and explorative FA when using direct oblimin rotation. The results are relatively similar to the ones reported when using varimax rotation.

  5. 5.

    To create such an overall index is hereby following the same procedure used to create an overall self-concordance index (Sheldon and Elliot 1999).

  6. 6.

    Appendix Table 13 contains the comparable results for the principal component analysis as well as the explorative factor analysis when using direct oblimin rotation.

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    Christian Ehrlich

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 11 Principal component analysis of items on the four-facetted goal-striving reasons framework (direct oblimin rotated)
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Table 12 Explorative factor analysis of items on the four-facetted goal-striving reasons framework (maximum likelihood; direct oblimin rotated)
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Table 13 Principal component analysis (PCA) and explorative factor analysis (EFA; maximum likelihood) of items on the four-facetted goal-striving reasons framework (direct oblimin rotated)
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Ehrlich, C. Development of the Short Form of the Goal-Striving Reasons Questionnaire. J well-being assess 4, 75–94 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41543-020-00027-z

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Keywords

  • Goal-striving reasons framework
  • Short form
  • Subjective well-being, work engagement, burnout