Identifying Achievement-Motive Types with CFA: A Replication of Wagner-Menghin (2003)

The Work Style test measures variables tied to the achievement motive, but it does so through Cattell's objective testing method instead of the usual questionnaires or projective instruments. Rather than asking people to describe their own motivation or inferring it from ambiguous stimuli, the approach reads behavior during the task itself.

Running Configural Frequency Analysis on the data turned up three distinct groupings that behaved as achievement-motive types. Each one lined up with what the theory of the achievement motive would predict, which is what made them worth naming. Wagner-Menghin had first reported these patterns in 2003.

The three were called the hope-for-success type, the fear-of-failure type, and the avoidance-of-failure type. What gives the finding some weight is that they did not surface in a single sample only. Both samples produced them, even though the two differed in how the testing situation was framed in motivational terms.

The replication was not perfect. When it came to the specific CFA types and antitypes, the exact configuration from the earlier study did not come back. The broader type structure held, though, and that partial agreement is the reason continued validation work seems reasonable: the categories survived even if every detail of the statistical pattern did not.

Keywords for the study: Configural Frequency Analysis, achievement motive, assessment, objective test, and aspiration level. The work comes from Michaela M. Wagner-Menghin at the Institute of Development and Assessment, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna.