ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to examine mastery motivation in ethnic minority groups and to place this work in the context of cross-cultural endeavours in psychology. The concept of mastery motivation described in this chapter is consistent with the notion of effectance motivation proposed by White (1959) and the operationalization of mastery motivation by Yarrow and his colleagues (cf. Yarrow and Messer 1983). Most of this work focused on Euro-American samples; exploration of the validity of the mastery motivation concept for subcultural groups was absent in the literature. Thus, our research was undertaken to adapt two measures of mastery motivation for use with Hispanic populations. The aims of the research were to examine the psychometric properties of the measures (particularly inter-rater reliability, internal consistency and testretest stability) and to gather initial evidence regarding the validity of the measures for the Hispanic population.
