Motivation Science, Vol 8(3), Sep 2022, 215-229; doi:10.1037/mot0000268
Goals represent a central construct in the analysis of human motivation. How people appraise their own goals on various quantitative dimensions, like commitment or difficulty, predicts important outcomes like goal attainment and psychological well-being. Unfortunately, however, there appears to be little agreement in the literature on how to best measure goal dimensions. To get an overview of current measurement practices, we conducted a systematic literature review that yielded 693 publications including 1,166 different terms for goal dimensions and 3,244 reported items. Up to 79 different items were found to indicate single goal dimensions and 80% of scales consisted of one item, which mostly asked for the term of the goal dimension name. We further extracted 358 different item facets, that is, different meaning-bearing terms (e.g., “engrossed” or “deeply involved”). Of these item facets, 28% were found only once in individual items, and 52% were used to measure more than one goal dimension. We found that for 42% of items, sources were not reported, or items were created ad hoc. Hence, we recommend being cautious of jingle fallacies when comparing similar goal dimensions across publications and being cautious of jangle fallacies when comparing different goal dimensions. We advocate considering construct validity and content validity more thoroughly in the development of goal dimension items and enhancing transparency in reporting of study items. Furthermore, we advocate factor analysis methodology to narrow down the abundance of goal dimension terms and developing parsimonious and comprehensive theories of goal dimensions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)