The Motivation for Learning Music (MLM) questionnaire: Assessing children’s and adolescents’ autonomous motivation for learning a musical instrument

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the psychometric properties and construct validity of The Motivation for Learning Music (MLM) questionnaire, designed to measure the autonomous motivation of young music students. Based on Self-Determination Theory (Deci and Ryan in Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior, Plenum, New York, 1985), the instrument consists of five subscales, each assessing a different type of motivation: intrinsic motivation, identification and integration, introjection, external regulation, and amotivation. We studied 337 child–parent pairs, with 257 of the children studying piano, and 80 studying violin. The children were age 6–17. The item pool was administered to the children, and various construct validation measures were administered to the children and/or their parents. For the final MLM, we selected 5 items per subscale, based on their psychometric properties and a desire to adequately cover each content domain. Each subscale formed a distinct component in principal components analysis; the questionnaire performed well in confirmatory factor analysis; the inter-correlations of the subscales had a consistent simplex pattern; and all subscales had alphas above.80.