Abstract
This essay attempts to correct chronic misconceptions about motivation research by providing some new insights as to its nature. Major emphasis is placed on the necessity of: (a) visualizing motivation research as a continuous rather than a dichotomous variable and (b) delineating clearly among three independent but frequently confounded variables, one pertaining to adequacy of experimental design, another to structure of the question, and the third to respondents' level of awareness of the experimental variable. It is proposed that motivation research is neither inherently qualitative nor inexorably shackled to projective techniques or to other unstructured questioning procedures. The only enduring and invariant characteristic of motivation research is that respondents must be at least partially unaware of the nature of the variable under scrutiny.
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