Poor Usability #2

I am writing my thesis on autonomous motivation and physical and mental energy. I plan to use hiearchical linear modeling to explore the relationships between different types of motivation at one point in time and subsequent physical and mental energy. I will use palm pilots to collect data at multiple time periods from multiple people. The types of motivation are consistent with Ryan & Deci's (2000) Self-Determination Theory which posits that there are different types of motivation and they differ in how autonomous the motivation is or how controlled it is. The more autonomous motivational reasons are intrinsic, identified, and introjected, and integrated, while more controlled motivation is mostly extrinsic motivation, or being motivated by external rewards. Right now, I am collecting data and testing out the palm pilots to make sure that these palm pilots can collect all the necessar information and that when this data is uploaded to a full computer that it will be easy to understand and interpret rather than all numeric code. I expect that people will have more energy when they did something for more autonomous reasons previously because these people did not use self-regulatory resources to do the autonomously motivated activity, while those who performed or participated in an activity for more controlled reasons were lacking energy later.

I'm also using HLM to work on a project involving goal orientation. We are relating different types of goal orientation, such as mastery goal orientation, approach and avoidance goal orientation. We will use HLM to explore how these types of goal orientation are related to participation in an activity and how those are all related to physical and mental energy. This is an exciting area of research - energy in the workplace is an increasingly important construct. I want to eventually connect energy to the stress-performance relationship and develop energy-focused interventions. This is related to my growing interest in Occupational Health Psychology.

I am interested in Occupational Health Psychology, particularly research related to stress and focusing on the creation of easy-to-implement interventions to help high-risk workers cope with stress to avoid burnout and/or injury and promote a healthy safety climate. I have gotten involved in several projects related to my interest in OHP.