“Well, I Have to Write That:” A Cross-Case Qualitative Analysis of Young Writers’ Motivations to Write

Abstract

Hickey (2003), taking a “stridently sociocultural” position on motivation, notes that conceptualizations of motivation must shift to successfully study “motivation-in-context” (p. 401). This study represents an attempt to navigate such a shift. Rather than taking established understandings of achievement goals and motivation orientations as given, this interview-based, qualitative analysis examines three creative writing environments—a secondary classroom, an extracurricular arts program, and an online game community—and analyzes adolescent participants’ understandings of their writing goals and motivations to write in particular settings. While such an approach relies on self-report and thus cannot capture implicit cognitions, its goal is to shed light on relationships among writers, contexts, and cognitions—and how traditional motivational paradigms may need to be amended to engage with such questions.

Keywords

• writing
• motivation
• goal setting
• qualitative analysis