The IAT Measure Of Motives And The Analysis Of Its Reliability And Validity

Motive is one of the most basic dynamic resources which drive human behavior, and thus draw much attention. Our predecessors have speculated on this topic and left us rich thoughts. Along with the development of the motive theories, the development of measurement of motive never ceased. The induction of the IAT in implicit motive measurement presents us a more efficient, easier, and more accurate method, which is highly promising.This paper intended to make further exploration on applying IAT in measuring motive. Confirmatory factor Analysis was applied to investigate the construct validity; through the comparison between IAT and the traditional method of TAT, we considered whether we can establish the convergent validity of the IAT measure; combining its corresponding explicit measure, we used the MTMM method to show whether the IAT measure of motive has both convergent and discriminant validity; we also explored the relationships between IAT and other variables such as personality and attitude to test the external validity.Through 5 studies, we established to some extend the Internal Consistency Reliability, the construct validity, the convergent and discriminant validity and the external validity. Our findings support the optimized algorithms of IAT effect, but questioned the notion that the IAT effect cannot be decomposed. We found that the coding method of TAT stories with the number of English words (of translation version of the stories) as the denominator gained the better fit to the tree factor model of motive. We also found that the multiple correlation model was better than the simple model while considering the convergent and discriminant validity. In the experiment, we found that the students were sensitive to the affiliation motive priming with the IAT motive measure. The findings on the relation between motive and personality traits support to the notion suggested by Winter (1998) that the correlation between traits and explicit motive should be strong that that between the traits and implicit motive, and also made it further that it showed the highest correlation between the traits and the congruence of implicit and explicit motives. The findings also show that, with the new motive measurement of IAT, we can capture some new feature of the relation between motive congruence and traits. Finally I discussed some possible limitation of this research.