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Affiliation Motivation and Daily Experience: Some Issues on Gender Differences

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Abstract

Study examined the relationship of affiliation motivation to related behaviors and quality of experience. Attention focused on how gender moderates such relationship.

For English language content: Copyright © 1991 by the American Psychological Association. Reproduced with permission from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1991, vol. 60, No. 1, 154–164.

We thank Kathleen Chattin, Ed Donner, Judy LeFevere, Jeanne Nakumura, Kevin Rathunde, Carolyn Schneider, Sam Whalen, Ellen White, Farzin Yazdanfar, Gary Zimmerman, and several other graduate students for their help in organizing the study and coding the data. We would also like to thank Tony Tam for his advice on data analysis.

Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Maria Mei-ha Wong, Department of Psychology, 5848 South University Avenue, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There is no questionnaire measure of intimacy motivation at present.

  2. 2.

    The longitudinal study, which was designed to examine why students failed to develop their talents, was completed while this article was being revised.

  3. 3.

    Those who had scores above the median were classified as the high group. Regression analyses using affiliation as a continuous variable and sex as a dummy variable were also carried out. The results were similar to the analysis of variance results reported here. However, using affiliation as a continuous variable created difficulties in the repeated measures design that tested the effect of affiliation, sex, and situation (a repeated measure) on the quality of experience There was no easy way to test the interaction between a repeated measure and a continuous variable in the SPSS-X program (SPSS 1986) that we used and other statistical packages that were available to us. To be consistent, we derided to treat affiliation as a categorical variable throughout the report.

  4. 4.

    Note that adolescent girls were significantly higher than boys on succorance, sentience, and nurturance but that boys were significantly higher in dominance in the normative data of the Personality Research Form manual (Jackson 1984). In this sample also, girls were significantly higher on succorance, sentience, and nurturance. The mean scores of succorance and nurturance for boys and girls were significantly different: for succorance, male M = 6.83, Female M = 9.76, t(169) = −5.89, p < 0.001; for sentience, male M = 8.41, female M = 10.79, t(169) = −5.90, p < .001; for nurturance, male M = 9.54, female M = 12.35, t(108.55) = −6.17, p < 0.00.

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  1. University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Maria Mei-ha Wong & Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  2. Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California, USA

    Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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Wong, M.Mh., Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2014). Affiliation Motivation and Daily Experience: Some Issues on Gender Differences. In: Applications of Flow in Human Development and Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9094-9_16

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