Measuring Achievement, Affiliation, and Power Motives in Mobility Situations: Development of the Multi-Motive Grid Mobility

The current study introduces the Multi-Motive Grid Mobility (MMG-M) in an age-stratified sample (N = 206) that aims to disentangle six motive components – hope of success, hope of affiliation, hope of power, fear of failure, fear of rejection, and fear of power – in mobility-related and mobility-unrelated scenarios. Similar to the classical Multi-Motive Grid (MMG), we selected 14 picture scenarios representing seven mobility and seven non-mobility situations. The scenarios were combined with 12 statements from the MMG. Both the MMG-M and MMG were assessed to allow comparability between psychometric criteria. The results of confirmatory factor analyses yielded a good model fit for a six-factor solution with an additional mobility factor for the MMG-M. Internal consistency of the items was similar to the MMG. Lastly, we investigated associations between the motive components and mobility-related variables. We found that risk awareness was positively related to all fear components in both mobility and non-mobility scenarios. Most importantly, physical constraint was positively associated with fear of rejection and fear of power in mobility situations underlining the importance to create support systems to reduce these concerns in people’s everyday lives.